AXIS//NOLL
NURBS in 30 Minutes: The Four Numbers Behind Every Curve You've Ever Lofted
Degree, control points, knots, weight — the mathematics under every Rhino curve, taught hands-on with the open-source rhino3dm library. Clone it and read the four numbers yourself.
Packing Circles: Why the Densest Cloud Is the Cheapest Structure
How circle and sphere packing — from π/√12 to Kepler and Descartes — turns a generative disc cloud into a defensible, reproducible structural spec.
The Segmented Shell: How You Fake a Curve and Keep the Physics
How segmented shells keep membrane efficiency while deleting the mould — from Candela to BUGA's 376 timber segments to ETH's demountable concrete floors.
The Shoelace Behind a Live Freeform Area Take-Off
How Gauss's shoelace and Green's theorem let a freeform boundary hand you its area every frame — plus a four-line Grasshopper GHPython node you can wire today.
IFC in Notepad: reading a building with three lines of IfcOpenShell-python
IFC is a plain-text STEP graph you can open in Notepad. Read and edit a real building in three lines of IfcOpenShell-python — no licence, no vendor lock-in.
Visual Programming, from zero: the dataflow graph is the real language
Grasshopper, Dynamo, n8n and ComfyUI share one idea: a directed acyclic graph. Learn the dataflow model that survives when the plugin goes dark.
Cache-augmented generation: the cheapest token is the one you never re-read
How CAG caches a frozen corpus to cut RAG cost — the O(n²) attention bottleneck, Redis TTL traps, and where a Swiss BIM studio should actually reach for it.
Vector Databases: The Nearest-Neighbour Geometry Under Every RAG Pipeline
Vector-database adoption grew 377% in 2025. Strip the marketing and it is nearest-neighbour search — a Voronoi partition of meaning-space. The maths, explained.
The Constitutive Model: What a Material Promises, Written as Code You Can Falsify
What a UMAT really is, why return mapping conserves volume, and the one question to ask your engineer before signing off any FEA result.
URBAN5, 1968: the design machine that failed — and the maths that outlived the file
Negroponte's 1968 URBAN5 printed garbage, but its boundary operator and its conflict-vs-incompatibility split still outlive the FORTRAN. Here's the maths.
