AXIS//NOLL
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.
Matter: How a Light Bulb Becomes a Typed Node in the Building
How Matter turns a $7 Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W running rs-matter into a self-describing node — the node/endpoint/cluster/attribute model architects should know.
As Hangs the Chain, So Stands the Arch: Form-Finding from One Curve
Hooke's hanging-chain principle, the catenary cosh, and Swiss form-finding from Isler to ETH's RhinoVAULT — with a 3-line Python arch you can run today.
Your Face Is a Façade: What Apple's Personas Reveal About Gaussian Splatting
Apple's Vision Pro Personas use Gaussian splatting. PAZ unpacks the geometry behind it — the R·S·Sᵀ·Rᵀ covariance — and what it means for AEC survey.
The Flow Field: Where Noise Pretends to Be a Force
A flow field is a vector field; a streamline its integral curve. Perlin noise looks like load paths but minimises nothing — a 10-line p5.js Hack shows why.
