PAACADEMY is a computational design school founded by Hamid Hassanzadeh in 2018. We teach Grasshopper, Rhino, AI, and digital fabrication through live workshops led by designers who still practice. Students keep their files, the recordings, and a network of architects that stays with them long after class ends.
Why we started
In 2018 the tools reshaping architecture lived behind a handful of studio doors. PAACADEMY exists so anyone can walk through: live sessions instead of recorded lectures, real briefs instead of exercises, and instructors who go back to their own practices when the workshop ends.
Computational design stops being a closed-door specialty. Architects at every stage of their career can think with Grasshopper, Rhino, AI, and fabrication as fluently as they draw, and the people they meet in a session stay in their work long after class ends.
A note from the founder
I started PAACADEMY because the conversation I wanted to be part of was happening in too few places. Computational design was not a niche interest, it was where the discipline was heading, and most architects had no realistic way to get near it.
Eight years on, the part I am proudest of is not the catalog. It is that people who met in a workshop are now working together across continents, and that architects with decades of practice sit in the same session as designers who are just starting.
Learning in public
Workshops run live. Questions get asked out loud, definitions break on screen, and the instructor debugs them while the room watches. The recording goes into the archive afterwards, so a session outlives the weekend it happened in.
The format started as a constraint and turned into the point. Watching an experienced designer get stuck and reason a way out teaches more than a finished tutorial ever does. It also makes the work feel reachable, which is most of the battle.
The room
Some people arrive having never opened Grasshopper. Others have been practicing for thirty years and want to work a different way. They end up in the same room, and that turns out to be the most valuable thing about it.
Nobody leaves with only notes. Students take the files, the models, and the reasoning behind them, then bring their own projects back for feedback.
What stays after
What we teach shows up in what students do next. Some have gone on to studios such as Zaha Hadid Architects, Bjarke Ingels Group, and Foster + Partners. Others opened their own practices. Many simply changed how they work on Monday morning.
The rest of it was never designed. Collaborations between people who met in a session, questions that arrive years later, projects sent over just to be seen. A school was the plan. The community showed up on its own.
People do not only come here to learn. They come to transform.
The people
Instructors here are practicing designers rather than full-time lecturers. They teach what they are currently working on, which is why the material moves as fast as the field does.
See all instructorsWhether you are opening Grasshopper for the first time or coming back to it after years in practice, there is a session for that.
