The Descent Networks of Calandra
A technical appraisal of gravity-glide urban transit
Research
Notes on AI, geometry, and the craft of building.
Essays, field notes and occasional experiments. Written slowly.
- 01
- 02
The Company Is a Flowchart
Why the hardest problem in enterprise software is a modelling error, and why the fix has to be free
- 03
The Plural Shelf
Consumer decision trees model an averaged shopper who does not exist, and function alone has stopped being sufficient to sell
- 04
Can a City Take a Joke?
Phantom infrastructure, public art, and the case for civic self-annotation
- 05
The Volume Asymmetry of Physical AI
Why physical intelligence requires capex substitution, edge perception, and owning the unrecorded state of space over time.
- 06
3D Was Never an Interface
Why the spatial turn in artificial intelligence is a data argument, not a display argument
- 07
Building Without Blocks
Deep tech, government, and the decade India built its own substrate
- 08
Machine-readable, then machine-run
Compressing the dg2n thesis — the AI operating layer for physical retail — into thirty seconds.
- 09
AI Decentralization Ends at Your Dinner Table
The intelligence race pushes AI onto owned hardware, then onto your body. A three-to-four-year chain, told as a story.
- 10
Form-finding with AI: from catenary to catenet
Using diffusion-based surrogates to explore the shell design space — shortening a week-long topology study into minutes.
- 11
A digital twin for Shwaas
Monitoring five in-situ shell structures in real time. Temperature, strain, rainfall — and how the data changed the way we pour concrete.
- 12
Ten years of the flexible formwork patent
A retrospective on WO2016156915A1: what worked, what didn't, and why the next version is generative.
- 13
From plan to massing in one prompt
A study of how LLMs can operate on architectural plans as a structured medium, not just a picture.
- 14
From the metaverse to the matterverse
After 100,000 immersive experiences on GMetri, a thesis on why the next decade will bring the virtual back to the physical.
- 15
Fabric forms, revisited
Weaving formwork directly at site — what Block Research Group documented in 2015, and what we've learned since.