EXTREMIS Vol. 1: Solaris

EXTREMIS is a speculative architecture and interior-design journal documenting the habitats of the Great Filter: remote outposts where humanity survives on hostile worlds. It started from one question: what would furniture look like if it had to solve a lethal problem instead of looking good. The project calls this the Antagonist Environment. Each world has one enemy that design must answer: dust on Mars, heat near the Sun, acid on Venus, parasitic growth on Gliese, wind on Proxima.

Volume 1 centres on Solar Brutalism and the Icarus Station, in helio-stationary orbit 0.3 AU from the Sun. The first sketches were objects for zero gravity, Mars, a volcanic crater, a black hole and a supernova. Early world ideas such as underwater cities and icy wastelands were dropped.

The world was written down before any image was made. A set of system prompts, which the project calls the World Constitution, tells the AI how Icarus-01 behaves physically: surfaces from Vantablack to oxidised copper and scorched concrete, the optics of old lenses with chromatic aberration and the sensor noise of a 1990s industrial camera, and a rule of lethal contrast between total shadow and blinding sunlight. The palette is void black, graphite grey and solar gold. The crew lives in an artificial night, and windows are shielded slits, not views.

The prompts went through several versions. The first set came out of a chat with Gemini and put the objects in a white studio, in the style of Scandinavian design magazines. That did not fit the idea of impossible environments, so the brief changed: studio-quality lighting and framing, but a background that follows each object's story. Later the prompts became structured JSON that separates subject, environment and optical effects, which made results repeatable and let one parameter change without redoing the whole image. Each object was first generated alone on a clean background, then used as an image reference for the final scene, in a worker's hands or inside the station. Among the objects are the Eclipse-Shutter Visor, the Mag-Lock Gauntlet and the Zero-Kelvin Flask.

The text was worked in the same loop. A separate critic bot read the whole journal, pointed out that it lacked social tension, and that led to new spreads. Every page of copy was then revised by hand to keep a dry report voice, and the internal logic, such as temperature regimes and magnetic fields, was checked against the world rules. The layout follows fashion and architecture journals: bold sans-serif headers, monospaced data blocks, full-bleed images and a lot of empty space. It was planned as a flatplan first, with an introduction and one section per antagonist, then laid out page by page in Figma, exported as a print-ready PDF and printed as a 42-page journal.

Made at NABA (Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, Milan) for Digital Cultures and delivered in February 2026. The journal is AI-assisted: the renders and parts of the copy were made with AI (Gemini). The layout and the final edit of every page were done by hand.