PAZ Kaffi is the AEC newsroom of PAZ Academy Zürich — daily dispatches on architecture, computational design, BIM and AI.
From Klumpner's Caracas Vertical Gyms to a Grasshopper-and-Galapagos desk at ETH D-ARCH: watch Pablo Levine's PAZ Building System Specialist graduation, 25 Aug 2026.
21 AUG
Why complex geometry's rigidity — and a 17-year-old's 146-shape proof — teach parametric designers that constraints are what make a form classifiable and defensible.
21 AUG
CH
Europe just cut the freight-wheel inspection interval after the 2023 Gotthard derailment. The deeper lesson: redundancy sharing a joint is one path there.
20 AUG
Grok 4.6 lands in Cursor, Copilot and Bedrock at $2/$6 per million tokens. Pin the model string, log every call, and govern the default before it governs you.
20 AUG
A PAZ foundation essay on Zero-Trust Architecture — NIST SP 800-207, BeyondCorp, and why the jobsite of 2026 must verify every request, not trust location.
20 AUG
A hands-on scikit-learn tutorial: compress a facade photo with k-means, see why prediction equals compression, and keep every pixel inside Swiss jurisdiction.
19 AUG
CH
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.
19 AUG
MIT CSAIL's SceneSmith generates robot training worlds from text with GPT-5.2 agents. From the site floor: why your IFC model is the map robots actually need.
19 AUG
Meta removed Horizon Worlds from Quest on 15 June 2026 and community worlds were never exported — $88B of Reality Labs losses later. What AEC teams should demand about open formats before signing.
"The machine doesn't have taste. We have taste. The machine has a tempo."
18 AUG
A hands-on C# tutorial for computational designers: when a coordinate should copy and a model element should be shared — value vs reference, on 4,000 points.
18 AUG
How timber shells carry load in-plane like Mannheim's lath net and BUGA's 376 cassettes — form-finding, faceting, buckling, and building for disassembly.
18 AUG
Anthropic marked Claude's text on 2 Aug 2026; a stripper followed in ten days. The four-layer provenance system, and a PAZ office SOP for handling it.
A studio in District B-12 has been operating in three time zones for nineteen months, with a permanent night shift that handles the regulator's queue while the rest of the world sleeps. The model: caffeine, clear handoffs, and a refusal to pretend that buildings are designed during business hours. We embedded for two nights.
From Klumpner's Caracas Vertical Gyms to a Grasshopper-and-Galapagos desk at ETH D-ARCH: watch Pablo Levine's PAZ Building System Specialist graduation, 25 Aug 2026.
Every morning at 04:00 the press in the basement of the kaffi spits out 2,400 broadsheets in a font we cut ourselves. The kids pick them up on the way to site, fold them into their toolbelts, and read them at lunch with grease on their fingers. The feed has not killed this. The feed has made it more useful — a single, slow, opinionated edit of a day too noisy to read live.
The print desk takes one position per story. The web desk runs a hundred. Both can be true. The point is that someone, somewhere, is still willing to pick.
There is a reason the best façade we ran this month was sketched on a napkin in the kaffi at 06:12 and not generated in a prompt. The hand still knows things the model has to be told twice.
Every studio we visit now hires straight into a 22:00–06:00 rotation. The juniors love it. The seniors who fought to get out of it find it harder to argue with the throughput numbers.
Hybrid CLT + steel core. Topping out by Q3.
Robotic masonry hits a real spec, not a demo.
And why the big vendors are quietly nervous.
Maps, owners, opening hours, kaffi quality.
The AEC dispatch lands in your inbox at 04:42 CET. Twelve stories, one bad joke, zero PR fluff. We sign each one.
The airlock is still sealed. Join the dispatch for now — VIP seats get called there first.
© 2026 PAZ Academy.
