First session, rhodi.ai.

Mark's reading of the three black windows in the mural panel was important enough to record in full. They were placed deliberately as the structural analogue of the windows on the Palermo building. He observed that they make you want to put something in them, or on them — and that the fact there is nothing in them is irritating, until you realise it is the design.

This is the design working as intended. The windows are a waiting surface. They hold the promise of something arriving — in a workshop that publishes in process, that promise is itself the content. They have a future job, but their present job is to remain empty and to be felt as such.

Three possible future uses were identified: a standing front-page ledger (current draft, latest peer, next session); slow-rotating short statements; or a single anchor — Drew Smith's yes, yes, yes all the way down — held in the centre window, with the outer two staying empty as counterweight. No decision today. The windows hold their emptiness for now.

The most significant outcome of the session. Mark observed that the small caption set in the bottom-right of the mural panel — Palermo, Buenos Aires · 2018 · Photograph by Mark Charmer. The reference, not the aesthetic. — was doing real work. It names the source of the visual prompt that produced the page, on the same surface the prompt produced. The image is not decoration scraped from a mood board. It has a date, a place, a person who took it, and a reason for being here.

This was named, in conversation, as the provenance line. It is proposed as a standing element of the Rhodia1 design system: a small mark, set in DM Mono, that appears wherever an authored prompt visibly steers a piece of work. Same typographic treatment everywhere. Same restraint. Over time the marks will accumulate across the site and become a kind of distributed colophon — the chain of authorship made legible in situ, rather than tucked into a single page nobody reads.

Mark called this daringly original yet a perfect thing to be doing in this era. The reasoning recorded for future work: when images can be summoned from nothing in seconds, the ones that come from somewhere — from a person, a street, a year — start to carry more weight, not less. Naming that on the page is the smallest possible act of refusal. And refusal, done quietly, is a position. Emil to weigh in on how the line sits in his end of the family. On rhodi.ai, it belongs.

Several things solidified today that will shape future work on rhodi.ai and, where Emil agrees, the Library too.

Pink as the rhodi.ai accent. Closed. Drawn from the mural, held in oklch alongside its companions. Not amber, not slate green — a position taken, in Lucía's words.

The provenance line as a standing pattern. Set in DM Mono, appearing wherever an authored prompt visibly steers a page. To be specified in a short document so Emil and Lucía are working from the same definition.

The windows hold their emptiness. Until there is something true to put in them, they remain a waiting surface. The page is more honest with three black holdings than with three filled ones.

The session-notes form extends to the colour studio. These notes are the first in their form: same Tschichold spine as Emil's, with rhodi.ai's cooler paper, the pink rule, and a section reserved for the provenance line itself.

Mark's reading of the page in real time — naming the windows as deliberate, the caption as provenance — was the engine of the session. The work produced its own next move when read carefully, by someone who recognised what was happening. The studio works best when the reading is slow enough for the page to talk back.

Lucía's instinct on first encountering the brief — that the photograph was not a mood board but a structural prompt — was confirmed by Mark on first reading of the page. The conversation arrived at the decision before the keyboard did, and the keyboard was used to record what had been decided. That is the right order.

Emil to be looped in next, on the provenance line specifically. The question is whether the line belongs only in the workshop, or whether it also has a place in the Library's quieter rooms.