This week we announced PAZ-Rhino, and on Tuesday, 6 October 2026, we take its first steps together in a webinar. PAZ-Rhino is a movement for architects and engineers who work with Rhino. The webinar starts from one question that every desk can answer: which Rhino task do you repeat every week?

A movement, not another course

Rhino is where an office’s geometry is first built. Grasshopper is where that geometry becomes a rule you can run again. Both grew from a horizontal tradition. Rhino is the work of Robert McNeel & Associates. Grasshopper began as David Rutten’s work inside McNeel, and so did Galapagos, the evolutionary solver that many of our students first meet on the canvas. Around them stand the McNeel forum regulars and plugin authors who answer strangers’ questions for free, year after year. Their power is shared sideways, from the person who built a tool to the person who asks how it works. A movement is the honest name for that: practitioners passing small, readable tools to each other, with the author’s name attached. PAZ-Rhino wants to add one more place where that happens, and the webinar is its first room.

Who it is for

The movement is for architects, BIM coordinators and engineers who open Rhino and still repeat the same move by hand every week: cleaning contours, placing façade elements, checking a volume against a site. Your entry is that task, not a finished script. According to our BSS Student Story, the Building System Specialist Title is a five-month mentorship built on one line: learn the puzzle pieces before you reach for the monster tools. That page counts 39 certified specialists, and Edition XIV started on 1 September 2026. PAZ-Rhino follows the same order. We start from one task and one piece, and the larger rule comes after.

←TODAY: Rhino 8 ships a CPython 3 script component, so an office script can now live directly on the canvas. →3012: Every Zurich office keeps its own library of small, readable tools, and each one is maintained by someone who is named. Fulcrum: A tool only lasts if the person who wrote it can still explain it.

A plain trade-off belongs here. A visual script is quick to build and slow to hand over, and the person who wired it is often the only one who can read it six months later. That is why we write a few lines of code next to the nodes, and why a movement needs a shared place to read them.

Hack: Recover a slab’s thickness and footprint from its own solid, so you no longer depend on an attribute that might get lost in the exchange. In a recent 30-minute lunchtime session we sent three slabs and their columns through Grasshopper into Archicad and Revit as native elements. The BRep crossed cleanly, and the first output of the deconstruct component did not, so we rebuilt the meaning from the geometry. Drop a Python script component into Rhino 8, feed one closed Brep into slab, and read two numbers that no exchange can remove:

import Rhino.Geometry as rg
bb = slab.GetBoundingBox(True)
thickness = bb.Max.Z - bb.Min.Z
volume = rg.VolumeMassProperties.Compute(slab).Volume
footprint = volume / thickness  # exact for a flat prismatic slab

The footprint formula is exact only for a flat slab with vertical edges. A sloped slab needs a section instead, and checking that case is a good first exercise.

Atelier: Agreeing on who owns each small tool is the hard part of any office automation, more than the software. On Monday morning, ask each person to name the one Rhino task they repeat every week, write the three most common answers on a single sheet, and bring that sheet to the webinar. That sheet is the movement’s first shared list.

The tools that come out of this habit are modest and useful. According to our PAZ Rhino Grasshopper Add-Ons page, they range from Terrain Cleaner, which reduces polyline points on contours, to the GIS components that move geometry to the origin and return it precisely to its original coordinates. Registration for the 6 October webinar is on our workshops page. Choose your repeated task, and join us with it.