Yesterday, Thursday 15 October 2026, our second PAZ-Rhino Live on LinkedIn took on interoperability. In it we showed PAZ-RIA in public for the first time. PAZ-RIA runs Rhino and Grasshopper in the same session as an Archicad project, with no export file passing between them. The Grasshopper canvas reads data straight out of the Archicad model, and the geometry and 2D drawings it produces come back as native Archicad elements in the Archicad views.

Andrés Velasco Muro, who founded PAZ – Parametric Academy Zurich, ran the session. The full replay is on LinkedIn. It follows the first PAZ-Rhino session on 6 October. As our 6 October preview reported, that session started from one question: which task does your office repeat every week?

The people underneath it

None of this starts with us. Rhino comes from Robert McNeel & Associates, and Grasshopper began as David Rutten’s work inside McNeel. McNeel also built Rhino.Inside, the technology that lets Rhino and Grasshopper run within other host applications, and PAZ-RIA runs on it. That work is careful plumbing that very few users ever see, and it is the foundation we build on. We already use it in our consultancy work with offices. Yesterday we started sharing it with our own users.

The demo that matters

One moment in the replay is worth rewatching. A Grasshopper script placed a Voronoi and triangulated beam structure on a slab and sent it into Archicad as native beams, each with its length and cross-section. Then the script ran a second time. The model did not fill up with copies. The same beams moved to the new positions the script gave them.

That is where the value lies. A script that leaves duplicates behind creates a cleanup job. A script that owns its elements is a design tool you can run as often as the design changes. The geometry rules stay in Grasshopper and the documentation stays in Archicad, and neither side has to give up its role.

On screen this happens in the PAZ-RIA-Player window, a plain list of Grasshopper scripts with a Run button next to each. An office can collect its own scripts into a library there and put the ones it uses most on a keyboard shortcut.

←TODAY: On 15 October 2026, a Grasshopper beam grid landed in Archicad as native beams, and a second run updated those beams instead of copying them.
→3012: In Zurich-3012, every office keeps a library of design rules it owns and runs them as often as it redraws.
Fulcrum: The decision to update elements instead of duplicating them is what turns a one-off import into a tool you can keep using.

Who this is really for

PAZ-RIA is for one particular person. In many offices there is someone who knows Grasshopper and loves Archicad, and until now that person has had to work between two programs. Many of them are our own Building System Specialist graduates (39 of them so far) and the students now in Edition XIV, which began on 1 September 2026. With PAZ-RIA, that person can lead the office’s automation and build its script library in-house instead of handing the job to outsiders.

On availability: PAZ-RIA will join PAZ-BOX as a new add-on in all three packs, and PAZ-Rhino licence holders will get their own version. We did not announce a price or a release date yesterday, so we will not guess at either here. One trade-off is worth saying plainly. A shared script library is only as reliable as its weakest script, and a script that updates elements will just as faithfully update a mistake across every element it owns.

Atelier: For a 12-person studio in Zürich, the point is not more automation. The point is that the office’s design rules stay with the people who use them. If AI tools write part of your Grasshopper code, someone in the office still has to own the script that runs on the live model. Monday move: name one owner for the office’s script library and agree that no script runs on a project model until it updates its own elements cleanly on a second run.

Hack: Give every element your script creates a stable key, so the second run updates elements instead of adding new ones. Run the code in a GhPython component, with beams as a list of curves; scriptcontext.sticky keeps the keys from one solve to the next. Each beam keeps its key across runs, and only its endpoints and length change.

import scriptcontext as sc, uuid
keys = sc.sticky.setdefault("beam_keys", {})
out = []
for i, crv in enumerate(beams):
    k = keys.setdefault(i, str(uuid.uuid4()))  # reuse the key, never mint a copy
    out.append((k, crv.PointAtStart, crv.PointAtEnd, crv.GetLength()))
a = out

PAZ-Rhino Live continues next week, and the next session picks up PAZ-RIA where this one left off.

Archicad users who want to see where this fits next to PAZGPT and the other Archicad Add-Ons can find the current packs on the PAZ-BOX page. Before Monday’s stand-up, write down the one repeated task you would hand to a script first, and name the person in your office who should own it.