BAU
A Roof Found, Not Drawn: What Munich's 1972 Tent Still Teaches My Generation
The Olympiastadion's cable roof was form-found, not designed — what equilibrium structures and TNA teach heritage smart buildings about listening to their own loads.
Industry Foundation Classes: the open schema that is also your exit clause
IFC (ISO 16739-1:2024) is not just a file format — it is the open, Creative-Commons schema that keeps your building's data yours. A PAZ foundation essay.
I closed my carbon books before my first desk arrived
Fisher & Paykel's Auckland mass-timber diagrid closed its carbon books at 1,089 t ahead — but 'ahead' holds under only one of three LCA conventions.
Generative architecture: you stop drawing the building and start authoring the machine that finds it
Generative architecture flips design: you write the constraints and let the solver find the form. From Stiny's shape grammars to ETH's Shea — a PAZ foundation.
The Floor That Kept Its Promise: ETH's Rippmann Floor System Goes Tower-Scale in Zug
CreaTower I: VAULTED AG's Rippmann Floor System reaches tower scale in Zug, a ribbed vault with about 47% less concrete CO₂ than a flat slab, fourteen years in the making.
openBIM Is a Procurement Decision — the Politics Hiding in Your File Format
openBIM is a governance choice about who owns your building's data for life. Test the vendor claim, write one IDS rule, and draft the exit clause first.
The Plug Was Designed. The Swap Was Never Funded.
Kurokawa's Nakagin Tower designed a 25-year capsule swap that never happened. Why designed-for-disassembly is a data problem before it is a detail problem.
A Calatrava Block Learns to Feel Its Own Springs: Kreuzbühlstrasse 1, Zürich
Calatrava's LEED-Gold Haus zum Falken at Stadelhofen isolates the tram on a mass-spring. The one ratio behind it — and why a building must read its own sensors.
A basil leaf on a steak: what Rotterdam Rocks! asks a building to swallow
Barnabas Calder's Dezeen critique of MVRDV's €240m Shift Embassy, read from the building's side — why a leafy facade is accounting, not decarbonisation.
Thrust Network Analysis: The 350-Year-Old Theorem That Certifies Vaults and Grows New Shells
How Thrust Network Analysis turns Hooke's 1676 hanging chain into a lower-bound proof that certifies Gothic vaults and form-finds new compression shells.
