Seeing our film “The Moon Codex” distributed to the widest public doesn’t mean asking for the moon, true?

About two years ago we completed the realization of “The Moon Codex”, an ident created for Alfonso Femia and Stefano Foffano. It is a short fictional documentary based on the birth of the Moon - full CGI, the film tells the cycle from moon’s beginning to nowadays.

We are now glad to announce that Rome Independent Prisma Awards’ team judged that our film has something to tell! That’s why it has been selected to participate in the festival competition for the “Best Animation Short” category in the monthly official selection, and is now among the finalists. 

Rome Independent Prisma Awards is usually hosted by Cinema dei Piccoli, one of the oldest movies theaters in Rome, and in its first year it saw Silvano Agosti as president of the jury. Marcello Di Trocchio is now the art director of the festival.

While we are hopefully waiting to know if “The Moon Codex” wins - the winners of the month competition will be announced on Wednesday April 21st at 9pm CET on the festival Twitch channel - we hope for our work to be success!

Fingers crossed.

While sea level continues to rise at a rate about one-eighth of an inch per year, the theme treated by “Tempo d’acqua” (“Time of water”) becomes more and more relevant.

Presented as a short intro for Biennale di Pisa 2019, “Tempo d’Acqua” was produced together with Alfonso Femia. The short film suggests the changes of the world and contemporary ways of living merging architecture and water. It does it by speaking of the “cycles of existence”, the times in which water gave and took, pointing out the necessity to introduce a slow time alongside the frenetic time that everyday life imposes on us.

As for “The Moon Codex”, Rome Independent Prisma Awards judging team thought that “Tempo d’Acqua” has something to tell too! Actually, the short film was selected in the festival competition for the “Best Animation Short” category in the monthly official selection, and is now among the finalists. 

While we hope that our film will receive an official nomination - the winners of the month competition will be announced on Wednesday April 21st at 9pm CET on the festival’s Twitch channel - we feel more and more stimulated to create new artworks!

Another couple of fingers crossed.

We just got other good news for “The Moon Codex”, an ident we created for Alfonso Femia and Stefano Foffano. Completed in 2019, it is a short fictional documentary based on the birth of the Moon - full CGI, the film tells the cycle from moon’s beginning to nowadays.

Indie Short Fest has officially selected and nominated our film for the April season of the festival. This means that it has been shortlisted by the judges and can now be awarded. We were chosen between a total runtime of about 50 hours, and submissions from over 26 countries!

IMDb qualifier Indie Short Fest is an LA-based international film competition with red carpet live screenings and Q&A at the Raleigh Studios in Hollywood every two months.

The Moon Codex competes then for two categories: “Best Sound Design”, signed by Iz Svemira, and “Best Visual FX”, thanks to Uros Vukovic.

We are really proud of this first important result.

A lot of people have been talking lately about the importance of revolutionizing the education, and especially with the distance learning we have realized that Italian system is not prepared.

What if school is rethought?

Space and environment influence our behavior and consequently our thoughts. New actions allow us to create new neural connections and change the way we think and learn.

These projects, in collaboration with Ateliers Alfonso Femia (formerly 5+1AA), have allowed us to participate in important and impactful questions for us and for the society in which we live. We’re proud of these jobs.

We believe that change must not start exclusively from a digital revolution, where it is clear that the Italian school is a backward step compared to other countries, but requires a strong transformation of structures, where architecture must adapt to new cultural and, above all, social needs.

The school must return to being, as it was in the full economic boom (it is no coincidence that the only school facilities still used were designed in those years), a center of social exchange. The school is an integral part of each city or country, it is what keeps a community alive. When the school fails, everything around it dies. We have seen this over the past year with the pandemic, but the same process was already taking place in many small countries, where many schools have had to close due to lack of enrollment.

What is missing is a flexible school, in which the physical environment, which as we have already said, conditions the way in which we educate, learn and grow. The school of the future, therefore, must be built around the needs of users, but always with an eye to sustainability and the community that surrounds it. A school placed at the center of a collective investment today, for better education tomorrow.

How can you turn a point of view around and turn something as painful as social distancing into an aesthetically fulfilling object?

How to convey safety and ensure an excellent experience at the same time?

We visualized BUREAU BETAK's answer for Fendi FW21 show, where set design and event production had to adapt to the safety guidelines dictated by the pandemic climate, creating an excellent visual experience for first.

Among the sectors most affected by Covid-19, there is definitely the world of fashion and in particular the one related to events, such as fashion shows and presentations.

What is most surprising, however, is the creative ability of each brand to respond to this problem.

The latest fashion weeks have shown how the various collections have been presented digitally, but the common thread that has accumulated all brands has been a return to essentiality, an iconic luxury, able to last over time, as demonstrated by Kim Jones' collection for Fendi.

Ideas taken up effectively in the creation of the set design: the models paraded in a scenography created by glass structures in the shape of F (logo of the brand) that showed inside them, capitals and Roman ruins as in a large archaeological museum, to indicate a fashion suspended out of time, which does not follow trends but rather clean design and using a color palette on neutral tones.

The fashion world and all that moves it has received the message after this long year of anxieties, worries and sacrifices: absence of frivolity but a more sober and elegant mood is what it takes now, to start again.

We just got some good news for “The Moon Codex”, an ident we created for Alfonso Femia and Stefano Foffano. Completed in 2019, it is a short fictional documentary based on the birth of the Moon - full CGI, the film tells the cycle from moon’s beginning to nowadays.

Nominated at Indie Short Fest, IMDb qualifier LA-based international film competition, for the two categories “Best Sound Design” and “Best Visual Fx”, our film officially won this last prize, awarded to Uros Vukovic.

“The Moon Codex” is the winner of the April competition, which means that it can be nominated for the Annual Awards. Furthermore, as soon as the health situation permits, it will be screened at the Raleigh Studios in Hollywood, California!

Just as the moon orbits the Earth, our short film "The Moon Codex" starts touring the world!

"The Moon Codex" is an official award winner of the "Best Experimental Short Film" international category at Cosmo Film Festival. This means that it now competes in the festival annual trophy event, which is planned in january 2022

Cosmo Film Festival is an indian kermesse whicht takes place in the Scenic East Coast Road located in between Chennai and Mamallapuram, in the south of India. 

We are very excited about this recognition. 

Great news from the eternal city!

Both our shorts films "The Moon Codex" and "Tempo d'acqua" switched from Finalists to Nominees...the last step to the march edition victory of the kermesse.

Our director Uros Vukovic holds then two places on the podium. However, the victory went to "Gekou" by Ajisa Asai, and we can only congratulate this great japanese artist. 

Rome Independent Prisma Awards is usually hosted by Cinema dei Piccoli, one of the oldest movie theaters in Rome, and in its first year it saw Silvano Agosti as president of the jury. Marcello Di Trocchio is now the art director of the festival.

We are really grateful to the festival for this recognition.

From 1 May to 15 May 2021, the digital art festival New Normal is held in Basel, where Giacomo Veronesi and Barbara Weber present their installation NEVERGREEN.

Diorama is happy to have participated in the realization of  this augmented reality installation.

Nevergreen is the digital representation, in original scale, of a ship, which remembers the incident in the Suez Canal, happened 23rd March, caused from a mega-container Ever Green, 400 metres long and 59 metres wide, stranded north of the port of Suez, probably due to a strong wind. This event has had major repercussions worldwide with an estimated economic loss of 9.6 billion dollars per day, as as we know, transits through the Canal are worth 12% of world trade.

The intention of the installation, however, is not to recall it but to recall the different questions, especially on local transport, related to this event.

The public, during the fifteen days of the festival, will be able to meet, along the Rhine promenade, a Qr-code to scan and pointing the smartphone to the river will be able to admire the installation.

From Saturday 22 May to Sunday 21 November 2021 will be open to the public the 17th International Architecture Exhibition entitled How will we live together? , curated by Hashim Sarkis and organized by the Venice Biennale, which with its 124 years of history is considered the most important foundation in Italy and among the most important in the world.

The International Exhibition includes works by 112 participants from 46 countries. The exhibition is organized in 5 thematic areas, three set up at the Arsenal and two at the Central Pavilion:

Among Diverse Beings, As New Households, As Emerging Communities, Across Borders and As One Planet.

Part of the exhibition is also How will we play together?, contribution of 5 participating international architects, authors of a project dedicated to the game set up in Forte Marghera and open to citizens.

61 National Participations will animate the historic Pavilions at the Giardini, the Arsenal and the historic center of Venice, with 3 countries present for the first time at the Architecture Biennale: Grenada, Iraq and the Republic of Uzbekistan.

The Italian Pavilion at the Tese delle Vergini in the Arsenale, supported and promoted by the Ministry of Culture, General Direction of Contemporary Creativity, is curated by Alessandro Melis. The complex hosts the Italian participation and is one of the most visible spaces of the entire exhibition, thanks to the central location within the gardens of the Arsenale.

The theme selected for the Italian Pavilion is Resilient Communities and Regeneration of Urban Suburbs. The curator intends to focus on the issue of climate change. In particular, he wants to underline how, in Italy, climate change is putting a strain on the resilience of the Italian agricultural system and the production of high quality food that are the origin of the Made in Italy so famous in the world.

The layout of the pavilion will be physically and thematically divided into 2 sections.

The first section is dedicated to a reflection on the contemporary condition of the suburbs urban through works that address in an innovative and radical way, on different scales, the relationship between society and the environment, in Italy.

The second section is dedicated to the contents of Italian architectural research, to the future challenges that society will face in the regeneration of suburbs and resilient communities. This second section will focus more on methodologies, innovation and research in this area.

Diorama takes part in this huge cultural project, with the realization of 16 videos lasting 1.30/2 minutes that represent the identity and resilient character of the 16 Italian cities (Saluzzo, Varese, Mantova, Padova, Aquileia, Bologna, Prato, Calenzano, Lucca, Radicondoli, Ancona, Montebello sul Sangro, Caserta, Modica, Olbia and Cagliari) who joined this project.

Diorama followed and coordinated the artistic direction, setting the graphic output common to all the videos.

It was a long and complex work that involved a great team but gave a great result. Many hours and nights of work that involved several trips to the 16 different cities in addition to several online meetings and in presence with the various municipalities involved.

Good news from Italy and from Thomas Torelli, great italian cinema author. Our short film “Tempo d’Acqua” ("Time fo Water") is officially selected among the finalists in the 39° edition of Asolo Art Film Festival!

Presented as a short intro for Biennale di Pisa 2019, “Tempo d’Acqua” was produced together with Alfonso Femia. The short film suggests the changes of the world and contemporary ways of living merging architecture and water. It does it by speaking of the “cycles of existence”, the times in which water gave and took, pointing out the necessity to introduce a slow time alongside the frenetic time that everyday life imposes on us.

Created in 1973, Asolo Art Film Festival is the oldest festival dedicated to art films, conceived as a detachment of the Venice Biennale on the impulse of critics and essayist Flavia Paulon and sponsored at the time by UNESCO.

The festival includes the sections Films on Art and Arts Films - "Tempo d’Acqua" competes in the “New Languages” special category. The festival will take place both online and in person on August 28th and 29th. During this period, you will be able to watch our film on the festival official website.

Let’s break the ice about our last project for Martinelli Luce, new corporate video to communicate the brand positioning within the world of lighting design. Martinelli Luce is a lighting design leader, known worldwide for lamps like Gae Aulenti’s Pipistrello, Profiterolle by Sergio Asti or Elio Martinelli’s Cobra. But there’s a huge universe hidden behind these iconic objects, in a constantly evolving cosmo guided by technological research.

Minimalism, geometry and nature are the values through which Martinelli Luce tells its story and takes inspiration for its lamps. How could we enclose the path, the work and the philosophy of the brand in a single film without merely advertise? This was the true challenge, a big stimulus to overcome.

We’ve reached the conclusion that the best way to conquer the viewer is to find an alternative and immediate concept. To tell Martinelli Luce universe without falling into banality, we decided to use images of its iconic lamps, but without ever clearly show the objects. What does it mean? We worked specifically on details - materials, shapes, colors - through which the products can be guessed, but are never revealed. This manner of telling Martinelli’s story creates a film that is immersive and sensational more than narrative, diving the viewer right into the magic universe of the lighting design brand.

The film’s path moves from a cold atmosphere to a sensual warmth.

A flash of cold, crunching of a thin layer of ice, drops sliding on a cold surface, lights and shadows. And then, lights lighting up like a sudden epiphany of a starry sky, or emerging like the sun on the horizon, or melting in a fluid motion. Geometries composing themselves into the void, reflections and vibrations.Through the eyes but also the ears - stimulated by a captivating music - the film involves all the five senses: touch, smell, and even taste. Shapes are expanded and stretched, revealed like natural bodies, in which are inscribed the key-words driving the corporate philosophy.

Not just a film: “Lightforlife” is an experience.

First great success for “Lightforlife”, a corporate video we realized for the lighting design leader brand Martinelli Luce. Have you already seen it? To tell the brand’s universe, we created a film that uses images of its iconic lamps without ever clearly show the objects. The viewer is then immerse into the story through the use of details, creating a sensational experience that stimulates all the five senses.

Motion Design Awards is a daily award platform to recognise the hard work, talent & innovation of designers & studios for their best motion design projects. Our film was judged by a jury composed by professionals from around the world on concept, design, motion and sound criteria. You can vote too!

We are proud to see so many people and design professionals appreciating our job: it's a significant boost to continue in what we do and aim higher and higher.

“Lightforlife” begins to achieve success around the world! Our corporate video created for the lighting design leader brand Martinelli Luce has won the Art Design category at the third season of Iconic Images Film Festival, IMDb accredited Festival in Lithuania.

Unfortunately, due to the pandemic, the kermesse event is being closed session, but we are very grateful to the jury for this award!

Have you already seen the film?

Today we received very good news from northern Europe. "Tempo d’acqua" (“Time of water”), the short film presented as a short intro for Biennale di Pisa 2019 and produced together with Alfonso Femia, has been loved by the jury of Iconic Images Film Festival. Our film won the Best Visual Elements category!

The kermesse, IMDb accredited, usually takes place in Lithuania but is unluckily being closed session this year. But it's good to know that even far away our work is appreciated!

Thank you.

Remember we told you that “Tempo d’acqua” was officially selected among the finalists in the 39° edition of Asolo Art Film Festival? 

Guess what? Our short film, produced together with Alfonso Femia, won the “Mediterraneo Festival Corto” special mention, in the “New Languages” category. Here is the motivation: "Through a well-balanced editing between photography and dream, Tempo d'acqua recalls amniotic moods connected with the eternal power of repair".

We received the prize in the charming village of Asolo, near Treviso, where Massimiliano Napoli, head of production, was able to present the film in front of a real physical public, finally! 

That’s a significant recognition for our work, and a huge honour: Asolo Art Film Festival is the oldest festival dedicated to art films, conceived as a detachment of the Venice Biennale on the impulse of critics and essayist Flavia Paulon and sponsored at the time by UNESCO. The festival is now directed by Thomas Torelli, a cinema author that we deeply admire, and whose themes are pretty close to Tempo d’acqua. 

We’re grateful and congratulate all other participants and winners. 

What’s next? Stay tuned to find out. 
 

Where does a desire come from? From creating an idea in our mind. Call it fantasy, call it imagination. Maybe it’s the most precious faculty we have as human beings.

We are sitting in our office on the third floor of a grey building stuck in the middle of a polluted city. We can close our eyes for a second and imagine the golden hour of an old Sicilian village between the sea and the mountains. Aren’t we madly desiring to be walking through its streets? Maybe with a light breeze caressing our skin. So we just get a bag, book a flight and flee there. Now we can fall in love with that place: obviously we will. And then, when we’ll be far away, we won’t just desiring it: we will need it. And maybe come back.

When we see something that we like - a person, an object, a place - we need to experience it. To hear it, to smell it, to touch it. That’s why, in the museums, they have to tell us, and write everywhere, “don’t you approach, don’t you touch”. It’s an instinct, an irrepressible desire to experience what we see, and like, with our senses. Maybe because, somehow, experiencing means possess. That’s human nature. It’s quite the same with love, everybody knows it: when we fall in love with someone, we madly need to feel that person. That’s what sex is basically meant for, however we decide to live it.

We could even say more about desire. The more we desire, the more we want. When we imagine something for a long time, the emotion to obtain it is even strong and upsetting. Someone used to say that “the expectation of pleasure is itself pleasure”.

That’s the kind of quote that we learn more from advertising than from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's reading. Of course, if the desire isn’t at some point satisfied, it just vanishes. But it’s the whole thing that makes us feel alive.

Since ancient times, through an infinite number of artistic techniques, we have always tried to represent reality, but most of all our imagination and desire. Who would have thought, one hundred years ago, that one day, thanks to technology, we could be able to create images that perfectly reflect reality and that, unlike photography, actually anticipate it?

In some cases, we also can reinvent reality or create something is not physically possible in our universe.

That’s 3D power. By relying digital technologies, Diorama can do something precious and unique. Diorama starts from imagination and desire and transforms it into a concrete visualisation, turning desire into need. Once sight is satisfied, indeed, all the other senses remain.

We had the pleasure to read a very nice article on IFDM (Interior Furniture Design Magazine) about our collaboration with Martinelli Luce, who asked us to communicate the brand positioning within the world of lighting design through a full CGI film. 

“Expressive and visual quickness and freshness are conveyed by the digital medium, under the guidance of creative director Uros Vukovic, with original music by Iz Svemira. A reel that plays with vivid emotional content, and a sequence of images – 3D renderings – made of lights, forms and colors.”

To create “Lightforlife”, we worked specifically on details - materials, shapes, colors - through which the products can be guessed, but are never revealed. This manner of telling Martinelli’s story creates a film that is immersive and sensational more than narrative, diving the viewer right into the magic universe of the lighting design brand. Lightforlife has been nominated “Video of the day” at Motion Design Awards, and has won the “Art Design” category at Iconic Images Film Festival.

We’re very grateful to Manuela Di Mari and IFDM Magazine. Find the full article and the video here.

Born in 1990, Piotr Dabrowa is a multidisciplinary designer focused on lighting and objects. A very similar aesthetic unites his work with Diorama editorial line and artistic vision. That’s why, when found out his work online, we couldn’t let him get away: this is how our first collaboration with a young designer was born.

To set two designer’s works, a coffee table and a hanging lamp, we chose a marble quarry. Not just because it’s a high-impact display, but also because it’s a significant place where man’s work is combined with the work of nature. That gives life to an impressive backdrop which, thanks to its hard and sharp lines and neutral colors, is a perfect background for the exhibited elements, becoming the two absolute protagonists of the images.

The sharp contrast between the light and the bright tones of marble, illuminated by clear direct sunlight, and dark furniture, contributes to the enhancement and the exaltation of the latter. And the same goes for the contrast between the brutality and the irregularity of the background and the minimalist cleanliness of their lines.

We also chose a second theme for the set: the reflection, a fundamental element to show the furnishings in their entirety. In the case of the coffee table this choice is particularly meaningful, with its asymmetry due to the two different elements at the base.

Furthermore, we have decided to insert reflective surfaces that could offer a vision of the objects, like mirrors placed closed by, or water at the bottom of the quarry. This last solution allowed us to obtain the effect sought through the use of another natural element, in order to strengthen the concept of naturalness and essentiality at the basis of the entire project.

During the Milano Design Week 2021, taking place from September 4 to 10, we are really glad to present these two design pieces, moved from a virtual marble quarry to our creative space Motel D in Viale Caldara 13, Porta Romana district. You can come visit us from 5 to 7pm, or by appointment from 10am. Write to milano@motel-d.com.

See you there to see the works of Piotr Dabrowa with your own eyes!

Another great success for “Lightforlife”, our corporate video for the lighting design leader brand Martinelli Luce. Our film has won the fifth edition of Anatolia Film Festival, IMDb accredited kermesse that takes place in Turkey.

Anatolia Film Festival connects the audience to short, featured films and documentaries from all around the world. Our film was screened in Kadıköy, cosmopolitan district in the Asian side of Istanbul.

“No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other”.

It wasn’t just some guy that pronounced these words, but one of the most great architects in the history, Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959). While the contrast between man and nature is becoming increasingly bitter, and the catastrophic effect of human activity become more and more relevant, these words sound timely, and needed, today more than ever.

As creatures, we are part of nature in the same way as plants and animals. However, our supposed intellectual superiority resulted in oversized needs, that lead, in turn, in the arrogant desire to control and prevail over nature. But, “naturally”, we get the short end of the stick.

Everywhere we go today, anything we do, we are incapable not to leave our human footprint. But truth is that we are interdependent: our well-being depends on the environment around us. If nature feels sick, we feel sick too. The paradox is that nature is sick because of us.

As regards architecture, the idea of a natural way of living is luckily spreading more and more. From energy saving to sustainable building materials, the mere aesthetic and functionality leave room for the idea to adapt and respect nature. And the more we become affiliated with nature, the more our life gains quality: an increasing number of studies show that natural environment not only gives us what we need to live, but has a strong impact on our emotional and psychological well-being.

In addition, architecture that considers these aspects can go further, even managing to stimulate more meaningful interactions between man and nature. The ideal house can’t be seen from afar, it disappears in the landscape and emerges gradually while approaching. It has the same colors of plants and ground, with large windows that cancel the separation between inside and outside. It’s a house from where we admire nature, and not the opposite. Because, of course, nature is the best and only setting that we can imagine to set our lives.

EKO Canapé compostable by Christophe Delcourt

Capitol Complex Chair by Cassina

Luminaires by Christophe Delcourt

The Circle by Elisa Ossino studio 

Paintings by Bertille Achard de la Vente

After months of social distancing, lockdowns and virtual meetings, we are excited to finally take part to something 100% physical. Following the invitation of the director, Pedro Moreira, we will participate in the first edition of Inbetweenness Festival, three days dedicated to the archiviz world, taking place in Coimbra, Portugal, from 1 to 3 October. 

In addition to expose some of our personal images in “The beyond screens” exhibition, we will be among the companies of the recruitment sessions. Other than that, we’ll have a special Diorama film booth where our films "The moon codex", "Tempo d'acqua", "Equilibrium" and "Lightforlife" will be screened throughout the festival. As some members of our team will be present, it’s a unique occasion to show this part of our work in particular in front of a public.

Can’t wait flying to Portugal!

"It is not the right angle that attracts me, not the straight line, hard and inflexible, created by man. What attracts me is the free and sensual curve — the curve that I find in the mountains of my country, in the sinuous course of its rivers, in the body of the beloved woman”, wrote Oscar Niemeyer (1907-2012), famous Brazilian architect who made dynamic shapes and curves his stylistic code, earning the nickname “sculptor of monuments”.

Whether one likes it or not, the geometric rigidity of the architecture creates a strong contrast with nature. In fact, the straight line is a human mind invention: there are no perfect circles, ellipses or lines in our universe. Nature is a huge perfectly organised chaos; everything is melted into a harmonious self-governing system.

Look at a tree: we can’t find a defect in it. Look at its trunk, with those irregular circles that mark the passing of time. Look at its bark, made of furrows, wrinkles and shades. Look at its roots, expanding themselves underground, like veins that pierce the asphalt.

We always need to put names on thing, to make order. We tend to sum up, contain, reduce everything to geometry, mathematics, symmetry. But imperfection and irregularity make our bodies uniques, from a dorsal hump to space between the teeth. Even the Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid (1950-2016) used to say that “Life is not a rectangle. Think about a natural landscape: there’s nothing regular or flat in it, but everybody find those places likeable and relaxing”. We know today that curves neurally trigger a sense of relief in the one who observes it, and that straight lines are perceived as alerting elements.

Culturally, we tend to consider a straight line from point A to point B the best way between them. But this is the shortest way and could be not the best way. The best way it may be the one with more curves, it offers to us more point of view, more to discover, more to see. The more inspiring the journey, the more desires we can imagine. That’s exactly what we would like to do with our works. 

Nature-inspired design is made of curves and formal imperfections. The curved line has deep meanings, recalls natural shapes of the sun, the moon, the womb. It’s reassuring. Curves transform structural elements in dynamic ones, plastics, rhythmics and naturalistics. While architecture, for its part, is functional to stimulate some new forms of relationship between man and nature, provided that it respects the environment. Nature, with its shapes and colours, offers us extreme beauty, illuminates our houses with the sunlight. It offers us inspiration and decorations to make our environment relaxing and joyful. Cracks, marks and scratches make everything around alive: an aseptic environment is a dead one.

Not even Renoir ever draw a straight line, because “it doesn’t exist in nature”.

It looks like the huge architectural work by Gio Ponti is well known to everyone. Yet often not even the most experienced admirers of the milanese master know his only oeuvre built in France, one of the first of his whole career. It is called “L’Ange Volant” and it’s a private villa constructed for the Bouilhet family (owners of Christofle) on Garches’ ill, close to Paris. This private commission allowed him to realize his prototypical "casa all’italiana", conceived around the idea of joy, with spaces designed to host artworks, and the lightness of the maestro’s unmistakable touch. 

Not surprisingly, the villa will be the setting (and the protagonist) of an exhibition which marks Diorama’s first time into the art world. “Genius Loci”, from 16th to 24th October, is the first stage of a series of exhibitions that will take place in some private residences all over the world. 20 multidisciplinary artworks signed by international artists inspired by the creative spirit of the place will be shown through an immersive exhibition curated by Marion Vignal. 

We are glad to announce that we are official partners of this exceptional art experience. But other than that, we have the honour to collaborate with Laurent Grasso, a French artist we truly admire represented by Galerie Perrotin, for the production of his new artwork conceived specifically for the exhibition.

Born in Mulhouse in 1972, Laurent Grasso works with film, sculpture, painting and photography to immerse the viewer in an uncanny world of uncertainty. In 2020, he produced the installation-work Artificialis for the Musée d’Orsay. 

More details coming soon...in the meantime, you can book you visit here. 

North and south of Italy, Lithuania, Mexico (soon revealed!)…and now, Sweden! "Tempo d’acqua" (“Time of water”), the short film presented as a short intro for Biennale di Pisa 2019 and produced together with Alfonso Femia, has officially been selected at Arch Film Lund 2021, taking place in Lund, close to Malmö.

This year the kermesse will test a new hybrid form which opens up the festival to a new international public. Arch Film Lund will take place as a TV-show in front of a public, starting 16th October through all day and night: the film is screened and discussed in front of a public and streamed at the same time. "Tempo d’acqua" is furthermore going to be presented on the festival digital portal.

As films are primarly made for the public, we’re happy that more and more people see our work!

With the Covid-19 pandemic and the most recent natural disasters that have forced us to reconsider our relationship with life and environment, the theme of sustainability is and will be more and more relevant. At least until we regain a balance between man and planet, and adopt life models that take the respect of nature as a base.

Of course, there are still many open questions. But everyone, in their own small way, can do a lot with their daily choices. Choose to move by train instead of flying. Choose to reduce the consumption of meat. Choose to buy seasonal fruits and vegetables. Or again, choose to use natural and sustainable beauty products.

In fact, even the beauty industry is experiencing an important green transformation, in which sustainability guides more and more the creation and development of products. In this context, "sustainable" means that the resource or raw material must always be available and its production or collection must not cause permanent damage. Nature, through plants and their beneficial properties, offers us a vast range of products for our daily body care; beauty is in nature as well as nature is in beauty. The least we can do, in return, is to respect the environment and take care of it.

The Australian Aesop is among the brands that follow the principle of transparency and sustainability. Established in Melbourne in 1987, the beauty house is famous for its luxury skincare products but also hair care, soaps and fragrance that derive largely from nature and often have organic origin. Each of their boutique stores is designed with consideration for the materials and the local community, making each store different to the next. In addition to avoid animal testing or animal ingredients using, Aesop is ramping up its sustainability efforts with a number of eco-friendly initiatives. Among these, the use of recycled plastic for packaging or re-use by allowing customers to return empty bottles that are cleaned, sanitized, and refilled. Because, with a little effort, beauty industry can really get along with nature.

Fourth success for "Lightforlife", the video we produced for the lighting design leader brand Martinelli Luce. 

Our short film, among the selected of the Interior design category, will compete in the first edition of Moscow International Design Film Festival. 

MIDFF is dedicated to design, following an established international trend with similar festivals held annually in Milan, Toronto, Vancouver, Los Angeles, New York and Singapore. The decision to finally organize a design film festival in Moscow is further driven by the World Design Organization (WDO)® shortlisting Moscow as the World Design Capital® for 2024, with the winner of the title to be named in October.

The festival will take place between September 29 and October 3, 2021. Supported by Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation and Milano Design Film Festival, the festival studies design through the lens of cinema and goes into in-depth discussions of history, creative processes and ideas that form the foundation of all modern design trades, including architecture, fashion design, industrial design, urban space design, photography modern art, technology and artisanal crafts.

From 1 to 3 October we’re taking part to the first edition of Inbetweenness Festival, three days dedicated to the archiviz world, taking place in Coimbra, Portugal.

Here we present an exclusive Diorama film booth where our films "The moon codex", "Tempo d'acqua", "Equilibrium" and "Lightforlife" are screened throughout the festival.

Want to know find out more about us and our film division? We’ll be live on Instagram & Facebook on Saturday, October 2, at 2pm CET. Join us to know how we started making films and what are our ambitions for the future!

In the world of design, objects that can combine engineering, simplicity and creativity definitely win. That kind of objects have the power to transform a room only with their presence, to give a touch of personality or even to turn a setting upside down. They blend originality and innovation, they are timeless, evergreens. Better knowns as icons.

A design icon can fit in time. It seize the present needs of the market, but it anticipates tastes and needs of the future. Furthermore, iconic objects give life to connections with those who use them: sometimes emotional ones, which arise when these objects become true testimonials of a moment, an era, a place or a community.

Among the objects that reflect these characteristics we find the Ionik Stool by Oeuffice, the collaboration between Canadian designers Nicolas Bellavance-Lecompte and Jakub Zak.

Featuring some of the same natural materials used by ancient Romans to build classical monumental structures, Ionik Stool is reminiscent of antique stone capitals. In fact, this object uses a formal vocabulary from that of the classical architectural orders, playing with the contrast between an abstract geometric modernism and the elaborate carvings of the columns that inspired it. Of course, this stool doesn’t support a building but can be used as seating or a side table.

Designed by the Italian-French designer Joris Poggioli, the Rose Sofa is a limited edition corduroy piece of impressive size. It’s a composition of four enormous upholstered tubes, which monolithic presence is enlivened by the texture of the ribbed fabric. With a shape that is both atypical and design, this concept gives life to a unique silhouette.

The Etcetera chaise longue became a design icon shortly after it was launched by Jan Ekselius in 1970 and has maintained its status ever since. It has become a symbol of the expression of 1970s design and of what you can do with naturally elastic materials such as folded steel and jute fabric.The unmistakable wavy silhouette was an instant hit for its creative and fluid design combined with its incredible comfort that has stood the test of time.

As we like to play with contrast, but also in order to prove that icons are truly timeless, we decided to set these modern furnishing accessories in Athens, in the popular Zappeion. It’s a neoclassical building with a semicircle plan designed by the Danish architect Theophil Hansen, which incorporates formal apparatuses and ideals of classical Greek architecture. But we didn’t settle for its real appearance: we have peeled off the walls and ruined the frescoes, carving the sign of a very long time and creating a strong atmosphere of decadence. Between the curtains waived by a light summer breeze, these design icons seem to rest before welcoming sleepy guests at the end of a party, enjoying the last glass of the soirée. This decadent environment merges with contemporary design icons creating a melancholic harmony which stimulates a never-ending dolce far niente.

“Rose Sofa” by Joris Poggioli 

“Etcetera Chair” by Jan Ekselius

“Ionik stool” Kapital collection by Oeuffice

When we wonder if we’d rather be blind or deaf, most of us answer without hesitating: deaf. Because sight is the sense that connects us more to the world, that makes us feel alive, that allows us to enjoy beauty and appreciate the environment around us. However, what often comes next is the thought that, if you don’t hear anything, you can’t enjoy music, which is sometimes capable of overcoming the splendour of a landscape, the magic of a sunset.

Music doesn't need anything else: to deeply appreciate a song, we close our eyes. But what would be the sea without the sound of the waves crashing against the rocks? What would be a forest without the chirping of birds? Every sense matters, and it is difficult to fit them into a scale of importance. But there are some senses that we naturally consider less.

During the pandemic, those who have unfortunately met Covid, realised how important the sense of taste and the sense of smell are. Snubbed senses, yet decisive. Without the sense of smell, it is impossible to enjoy the scent of a flower, the fragrance of an apple pie rising in the oven spread throughout the house. Without the taste, you can feel nothing but the consistency of food, nothing but the softness of somebody’s lips. To have a complete experience of the world, the union of the five senses is essential.

There is a sense, however, that we think about much less than others. The last one that remains (except for those who also believe in the sixth): touch. This sense recognises the hardness and shape of objects that come into contact with our body, allowing the brain, which processes the informations he received, to "recognize" fundamental aspects of the environment around us.

Feeling the rough bark of a tree on your hand, the soft coat of a cat on your cheek, the raindrops on your face, the wind in your hair, the sand under your feet. What if we could feel something without touching it?

We have “challenged” nature, or rather our perception, trying to evoke a sense through another. This phenomenon is medically called synaesthesia: the stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. We have created images that stimulate touch and evoke the sensation of touching through sight.

We usually just have a visual experience of images, but the “material” aspect of these ones give us the sensation of touching them with our eyes. To feel without touching.

Taking place in L’ange Volant, a private villa designed by Gio Ponti on Garches’ ill (Paris), Genius Loci is the first stage of a series of exhibitions organised in some private residences all over the world. 20 multidisciplinary artworks signed by international artists will be shown through an immersive exhibition, staged from 16th to 24th October.

Some of the artists have been invited by the curator Marion Vignal to design artworks specifically for the exhibition. Among them, the French artist Laurent Grasso, represented by Perrotin. His film “Spectral Ponti”, of which we are executive producers, attempts to probe the supernatural dimension of the spirit of the place.

You can find "Spectral Ponti" teaser on our social media channels.

Conception and creative direction: Laurent Grasso

Courtesy: Perrotin

Title sequence: M/M (Paris)

Executive Producer: Diorama 

We're thrilled to announce that “J1 L'Odyssée, The Underwater City”, focused on the J1 complex, a historic hall in Marseille’s harbour, is part of the AFA competition in 9th Edition of Milano Design Film Festival (21st October – 24th October 2021). The film, commissioned by Atelier(s) Alfonso Femia, depicts the Mediterranean atmosphere that exists only in Marseille, combining architecture and nature and featuring the underwater world.

The program of Milano Design Film Festival will be available online for all the duration of the kermesse with a limitation to the Italian territory. The film will be screened at the festival before the jury's final vote on 24 october.

A film by Diorama

Direction: Uros Vukovic, Gilberto Bonelli

Production: Uros Vukovic

Music: Iz Svemira

Sound design: Odiseja Studio

The Venetian architect and designer Carlo Scarpa (1906-1978) used to say that “to place an artwork correctly we have to understand its nature, its character, its more specific essence”.

When we visit an exhibition, the single artwork’s meaning isn’t restricted to the artwork itself, but is a combination of sensory stimuli generated by the interaction between the oeuvre and the space around. If we see an art or a design work hanging on the wall of a gallery, in a museum, outdoor or in the artist’s studio, we have a completely different perception of it. We can therefore say that the work gives an identity to the place and that the place influences the meaning and value of the work. Sometimes, the artist produces a work for a specific place: in the case of site-specific intervention, the relationship between art and space becomes indissoluble. The artist can in fact freely interact with the architectural and naturalistic elements of the site, making it a more integral part of the work.

The preparation of an exhibition and, in particular, the way of hanging a painting, offers many indications on what we have in front of our eyes and allows us first of all to live an experience, and subsequently to be able to provide a personal interpretation or judgment. That’s why, as time passes, the space and the setting choice of an exhibition becomes more and more relevant.

In the first half of the 1960s, Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck worked on a commission for a sculpture pavilion in the Sonsbeek park to host sculptures of nearly thirty artists, including Brancusi, Arp, and Giacometti. Dismantled after a temporary one-year exhibition on view between 1965 and 1966, the pavilion was rebuilt in 2006 in the Kröller-Müller Museum garden in Hoenderloo, Netherlands.The pavilion consists of six parallel walls of light grey breeze blocks, which create corridors. In these five corridors, semicircular spaces are generated. The walls support a transparent roof, through which the diffused light enters.

What van Eyck designed, which we have freely reworked, is a space to admire in all senses: it’s a place created to enable public to admire a sculpture, but it’s also an integral part of the artworks and the exhibition: a space to admire. The contrast between a neutral, rough background and refined and colorful works creates a balance: the place doesn’t dominate the work, but it doesn’t even disappear.

Inside the Pavillon, we placed some sculpture by English artist Vic Wright, that we deliberately magnified, and armchairs by Russian designer Olga Engel, in order to create a dialogue between art, architecture and design, as playing hide and seek: around every corner, a new art experience waits to be discovered.

Sculpture by Vic Wright 

Armchairs by Olga Engel represented by Armel Soyer

Reinterpretation of Sonsbeek Pavilion by Aldo van Eyck

The church has always appealed to the creative abilities of artists to interpret the message of God and its concrete application in the life of the Christian community. That’s why every church is a museum, a sophisticated blend of classical art forms (such as painting and sculpture) and architecture. However, sacred art wasn’t born as a pure artwork, but for devotional purposes. It’s not an art to be admired, but to be used to get closer to God. In whatever way we consider it, since the church is a place of worship and culture, we can still think of it as a museum. Even if we don’t go to mass, many of us have walked through more church doors than houses.

For some years now, churches have become shrine of treasures that don’t necessarily have to do with religion, but rather with art and architecture, and which perhaps are very far from the religious theme. Many churches, most of which are now deconsecrated, are intended to exhibit art, suggesting a fruitful dialogue between tradition and modernity.

Even though he was a layman, the master of Arte Povera Jannis Kounellis (Pireo, 1936 - Roma, 2017) often worked in the religious sphere. He used to say that the artist shouldn’t only be spiritual, but should “be able to touch religion”, and contemporary art could play its role. More and more projects bring contemporary art to ancient religious buildings. Another concrete examples is the permanent installation designed by Dan Flavin (New York, 1933 - 1996) for the church of Santa Maria Annunciata in Chiesa Rossa, in Milan. Or just think to the Kunstraum Kirche exhibition, an annual event which invites selected artists to exhibit their artworks in St. James cathedral, in Innsbruck.

As we like to go further, we took an artwork by Arik Levy (Tel Aviv, 1963) and we set it in the ancient Reims Cathedral, roman catholic church based in northern France : there are “only” eight centuries between the artist’s installation and the building. Reims Cathedral was the traditional location for the coronation of the kings of France. Prominent example of High Gothic architecture, it was damaged and rebuilt several times, and comes to us with its thick walls steeped in history and a vertical beauty that never ceases to surprise.

Because we like to play on contrasts, which create risk and movement, we’ve cleared the nave and we’ve transformed the floor into a huge mirror that reflects the ceiling. Here, we’ve installed the monumental white marble sculpture “RockGrowth exploration” by the Israeli artist. The latter has repeatedly taken up the subject, varying its shape and material. We’ve first set it in place of the altar and then, as if it were moving by itself, we placed it between the side naves of the church. Previously hidden like Wrapped Monuments by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the sculpture gradually reveals itself as it was flooded by heaven’s diviner light and the conquers the space.

RockGrowth exploration by Arik Levy

Tempo d’Acqua, (“Time of water”), the short film presented as a short intro for Biennale di Pisa 2019 and produced together with Alfonso Femia, hasn't finished touring the world yet!

Selected in the “Corto documental internacional” category of Cinetekton, International Film and Architecture Festival taking place in Puebla (Mexico), the film will be screened twice: on Sunday, November 7, at MUSA and on Thursday, November 9, at Cinemateca Luis Buñuel.

You can find the full program here. 

Cinetekton is a cultural and dissemination project, training and promotion of local, national and international cinematography that values the work of the production designer, the art director and fosters dialogue on urban planning, resilience, mobility, architecture, public space and the city. The festival makes the cinema look from the perspective of architecture and the relationship of the individual with the city and the spaces that it inhabits.

The 2019 edition was available on Mubi! 

We are grateful to Cinetekton for this great opportunity. 

If life is a novel, each of us is the undisputed protagonist of his own book. Through our eyes, we write our story day by day. Each novel is unique and unrepeatable because it is filtered by the personal vision of the protagonist: everything is written from his own point of view.

Literally, the point of view is the spatial property of the position from which something is observed and it represents, in a broad sense, the mental position from which events are seen. The expression literally describes what we see in front of us depending on where we are when we look at it. When we walk around a city, the perception we have about it is totally different if we look at at it walking down the street or from the top floor of a skyscraper. The point of view influences our perception, which can also change radically.

In a broader sense, everyone has their own way of seeing things, their own personal perspective influenced by their height, their position, according to their own principles, thoughts, judgments and education. However, to build a complete opinion on something we need to look at it from different perspectives, without limiting our vision to the first and easiest possibility.

Throughout history, the ability to change point of view has encouraged humans to invent: from the printing to the internet, from the wheel to space travels. It’s about adapting intelligence to needs and challenges. Knowing how to deal with new problems by changing perspective has always guaranteed survival and prosperity. It is therefore very important for our inner balance to train ourselves in mental flexibility. We can do it with a book: rereading the same text years later will give rise to very different sensations and reflections within us. This is because over time, only by living, we enrich ourselves with different visions and often change without even realising it.

We often are at the center of the scene and do not move: we see the world from our height. But seeing things from another angle allows us to discover unexpected nuances. The rules of perspective teach that the world is not unique, that it depends on the point of view. What you are looking at is just one of the many representations of reality.

“Just when you think you know something, you have to look at it in another way.” said John Keating (Robin Williams) in Dead Poets Society (1989).

Banquette Saint-Germain by Fabrice Juan

Snake tile by Casalgrande padana & Atelier(s) Alfonso Femia

After having had some success at festivals, our short film "Lightforlife" won a place among the finalists of the prestigious Cg Architect 3D Awards, commissioned film category. 

Made for Martinelli Luce, "Lightforlife" is a corporate video to communicate the brand positioning within the world of lighting design. To tell Martinelli Luce universe we worked specifically on details - materials, shapes, colors - through which the products can be guessed, but are never revealed. This manner of telling Martinelli’s story creates a film that is immersive and sensational more than narrative, diving the viewer right into the magic universe of the lighting design brand.

The winners will be announced on December 3rd. 

Fingers crossed!

“Equilibrium”, created in collaboration with AF517Atelier(s) Alfonso Femia, and presented at La Biennale di Venezia 2021 to provoke creative debate about life and architecture, is following “Tempo d’acqua” to South America!

The short film is the last part of the trilogy we’ve dedicated to the earth. As the name implies, for “Equilibrium” we started from the concept that everything natural on earth is conceived to coexist in an accurate and impeccable equilibrium.

Taking place from November 8 to 27, Biophilia International Film Festival, in its first edition, hosts films dealing with the issue of ecology, nature, native peoples, traditions, collective memory, cosmogony and rituals. Our film will be screened twice, in two different spaces in  State of Mexico and Oaxaca and will be available on Wahu streaming platform.

We’re grateful to the festival programmers for this opportunity!

Here we are almost at the end of the 17th International Architecture Exhibition. Entitled How will we live together?, it was curated by Hashim Sarkis and it began on 22 May.

The Italian Pavilion at the Tese delle Vergini in the Arsenale was curated by Alessandro Melis, following the theme “Resilient Communities and Regeneration of Urban Suburbs”. Focused on the issue of climate change, the exhibition intended to explore the capabilities for transformation and adaptation of Italian communities in an attempt to define tangible solutions to current global challenges.

We are honoured to have been involved in this ambitious project: in fact, we were asked to tell  the  story  of  resilience  with  sixteen different videos, one for each municipality, province or region involved. The first question to answer was: what is resilience? For us, resilience is a journey through time. Past, present and  future.  In  a  country  like  Italy,  which  has  its  strength  in  history,  it  must  bet  on  the  present  to  look  beyond,  to  a  future  worthy  of  its  beauty,  with  the  ambition  to  become  a  better  place.  Resistance,  resilience.  Telling  all  this  through  images  and  words,  through  a  journey  from time to time through the countryside, the valleys, the mountains, the suburbs, the roads, the  buildings,  the  land,  the factories,  the  rivers,  through  the  centuries-old  history  of  the  cobblestones  of  the  centres  to  the  future  redevelopment projects. A journey that would be both  physical  and  historical,  a  journey  through  history,  while  moving  through geography,  between one region and another and from the outside  to  individual  cities.  A  journey  through  images,  talking  about  sustainability,  heat,  green,  water,  memory,  regeneration,  heritage,  ecosystem, resources, culture, climate, transition, recovery.

(From “A journey through time” by Gianni Vesentini on AND, Scientific journal of architecture and design).

Like all things, this last edition of Venice Architecture Biennale came to an end. But this time, something special happened: we had the privilege of working on an ambitious project for the Italian Pavilion following the theme of “Resilient Communities and Regeneration of Urban Suburbs”.

With few words and a lot of Italy, we  have  chosen  to  tell  the  story  of  our  cities,  provinces,  and  regions  through  sixteen  videos  capable of accompanying the viewer from afar, bringing him slowly closer, showing through the footage  first  the  countryside,  lakes,  and  lakes  hills  surrounding  the  cities, their  suburbs,  to  arrive at the centre of the theme, the projects under construction  or  not  yet  realised.  A  global concept is presenting the whole of Italy as a unifying  element  and  allowing  the  viewer  to move  from  watching  one  video  to  another,  at any  time  and  in  any  order,  but  without  losing the general concept of all the films: resilience.

Therefore,  the  story  of  each  short  film  was thought of as being divided into three sequences:  a  first  part  of  the  introduction,  a  central  expositive  sequence,  and  a  final  sequence  showing  the  project  proposals.  The  first  two,  the  introduction  and  the  exhibition,  were  built from resources filmed on-site, with drones and ground cameras. At the same time, the final sequence was produced based on the project of each municipality through images partly filmed and  partly  computer-generated,  using  3D  animations. All of this was accompanied by timely guide  titles,  with  little  motion  graphics  and  a  few  infographics. And this is where the second part of our production process began, namely the phase of comparison and constant communication with the respective administrations, to draw up together with them and their various professionals, mainly  architects,  a  clear  and  real  concept, with  which  each  of  them  told  us  about  their approach  and  their  current  projects.

Sixteen concepts that we turned into as many storyboards to start drafting the  “script”  of  the  films,  planning  the  areas, the  themes,  the  shootings.  And  here  we  were lucky enough to work on a subject as beautiful, rich and strong as Italy itself, which made the filming a true testament to beauty, history, productivity,  Italian  genius  and  resilience.  Powerful contents, which, thanks also to the passion, vision,  study  and  planning  that  all  the  various  administrations  and  their  collaborators  have  shown us, have enabled us to create a true experience.

The  videos were inserted into a path created by architects  Paolo  Di  Nardo  and  Simone  Chietti,  like a  real  tour  of  Italy,  with  the  screens  arranged according to themes (water, green, earth) side by  side  in  a  unique  and  evocative  atmosphere, moving from one video to another, from one municipality to a province, from one project to the next. An immersive journey, thanks also to interactive projections. A journey into the operational  resilience  that  sixteen  administrations are representing the whole of Italy is pursuing. And seeing those images, the first reaction will be that of the desire to discover, to go to those municipalities, some less known, others better known, and to find oneself immersed in those  splendid realities that surround us, discovering a better future, which is a possible future and indeed already underway. Because resilience is a journey that we have already begun.

In recent years, we’ve noticed the lack of physical spaces bringing together creative professionals, thus supporting the exchange between disciplines. That’s why we decided to open the doors of the Motel, our Milanese house, bringing to life a creative members club called Motel D.

The motel is generally a place of passage, where people constantly come and go. The most disparate personalities meet inside, in a succession of rooms beyond whose doors flourish interconnected creative universes. The Motel D is conceived as an ecosystem in which innovation, design, architecture, business and creativity can converge. Those who are part of it, as within a natural ecosystem, bring value to the club.

The place reclaims an abandoned industrial space, a former printing house: a physical space of  700+ sqm, cleverly designed, that promotes synergy and networking. Common work areas, meeting and multipurpose rooms, a photographic studio with green screen, a private cafe and a garden make Motel D the creative’s paradise. A place to: stay, meet, work, discuss, see, discover, test, learn, chill and have fun.

Are you a creative professional? You can come discover Motel D during our OPEN DAYS on December 15,16, 17 from 10 to 7 pm by appointment (write to milano@motel-d.com) or on our OPEN EVENING on Friday the 17th from 7 to 9 pm.

We believe that only together we can do really great stuff.

What an intense time for us! In addition to the many projects going on, as we’ve just announced, we’re about to open the doors of our house in Milano!

Located in Porta Romana district, Motel D is a creative members club dedicated to professionals who live the city, every day or just occasionally. Once you have got your card, valid for one year, you become a member. You can come to Motel D whenever you want, to work, meet people or just chill, and you can participate in all events proposed by the club.

Wanna find out what Motel D looks like? You can come visit us during our OPEN DAYS on December 15,16, 17 from 10 to 7 pm by appointment (write to milano@motel-d.com). Otherwise, join us for a drink on our OPEN EVENING on Friday the 17th from 7 to 9 pm.

Can't wait to meet you. 

Motel D is a working and meeting space, but above all we like to think of it as a place of coaction between creative professionals. As a taste of what is yet to come, discover the first contemporary art exhibition we have the pleasure of hosting.

Created in collaboration with Looking for Art, KOONESS X MOTEL D features a selection of young emerging Italian artists with an exclusive focus on architecture, sustainability and forward thinking: Ludovica Crippa, Andrea Gallotti, Cecilia Maran, Sofia Mangini, Mattia Sanarico, Simone Sangalli and Matteo Piccolo (AKA TETI).

Motel D is our Creative Members Club in Milano, a physical space of  700+ sqm dedicated to professionals who live the city, every day or just occasionally.

Kooness is an online marketplace featuring a curated selection of Contemporary Art from international art galleries. Click here to see all the works present in the exhibition.

OPEN DAYS 

December 15, 16, 17 from 10am to 7pm (by appointment, write to milano@motel-d.com

OPEN EVENING 

Friday the 17th from 7 to 9pm

We’re happy to announce that “Equilibrium” will be screened in Copenhagen! Created in collaboration with AF517Atelier(s) Alfonso Femia, our 3D short film was presented at La Biennale di Venezia 2021 to provoke creative debate about life and architecture.

“Uninhabited” International Film Festival centers on the subjects of the outdoors, nature, exploration, walking and sustainability, with a focus on the poetics of film, language and sound to deliver feelings and experiences. The festival will take place throughout January 15th-23rd of 2022 at Red Door Gallery and two other locations for a special selection of films.

“Equilibrium” is the last part of the 3D films trilogy we’ve dedicated to the earth. As the name implies, we started from the concept that everything natural on earth is conceived to coexist in an accurate and impeccable equilibrium.

2021 has been a year full of good news for DIORAMA, and if we look behind us, the way we have come since the last one seems quite long. 

First of all, “thanks” to Covid, we switched to 100% remote. The team has expanded and spread. Some of us went back to their hometowns, others fled far away from Milan or Paris and will never return, and  others still have chosen a nomadic life in between countries with their laptop in their backpack. Despite being connected, like many others the past two years have highlighted the importance of being physically close as well. Hence the year closes with the opening of our milanese house Motel D, which is now open to creatives looking for a place to work together and stimulate each other. 

We have also finally launched our new website in May, which has gone hand in hand with the definition of a Diorama aesthetic and art direction that best represents us. Our images have been published on AD, Domus, Living, IFDM, Interni, Marie Claire Maison, The Ducker and other international magazines, giving us great visibility. Furthermore, with our own productions we published on social networks, we enjoyed conceiving and art directing projects around objects of art or design that we like. Amongst  these we had the chance to collaborate with Polish designer Piotr Dabrowa, whose work is still exhibited in our space, Motel D.

Another accomplishement of 2021 were Festival selections and Awards for our films, a department on which we would like to focus more and more. Amongst others, Tempo d’Acqua was presented at Asolo Art Film Festival, while Odyssée was screened at Milano Design Film Festival. And again, Equilibrium and Martinelli have travelled the world, from Denmark to Mexico. Finally, we had the opportunity to participate in the Venice Architecture Biennale, telling stories of resilience with sixteen different films, one for each municipality, province or region involved in the project. Our work was part of the Italian Pavilion, in a path created by architects Paolo Di Nardo and Simone Chietti.

And there’s more: in October we made our official entry into the art world with Spectral Ponti, the piece created with the artist Laurent Grasso on the occasion of the Genius Loci exhibition at the Villa L’Ange Volant by Gio Ponti in Garches (Paris).

We said it 365 days ago, so it is worth repeating: happy new year!

May it be prosperous and bright. Happy holidays, to those who celebrate the Christian anniversary as well as to those who see it just like a a good excuse to eat well in good company.

We are super happy to announce that the exhibition KOONESS X MOTEL D hosted by Motel D is extended until January 28!

Created by our official partner Kooness in collaboration with the Milanese gallery Looking for art, it features a selection of young emerging Italian artists with an exclusive focus on architecture, sustainability and forward thinking. As a taste of what is yet to come in our space, you can come visit the exhibition starting from January 10 from 10am to 6pm (Monday-Friday). Write to milano@motel-d.com or send a DM here just to be sure we can welcome you in person!

Motel D is our Creative Members Club in Milano, a physical space of  700+ sqm dedicated to professionals who live the city, every day or just occasionally.

Kooness is an online marketplace featuring a curated selection of Contemporary Art from international art galleries. Click here to see all the works present in the exhibition.

We’ve been glad to discover that “Equilibrium” has won the Best Visual Effects category at New Creators Film Awards!

Created in collaboration with AF517Atelier(s) Alfonso Femia, our 3D short film was presented at La Biennale di Venezia 2021 to provoke creative debate about life and architecture.

New Creators is an international bimonthly online competition which celebrates creativity and aims to highlight the creators of tomorrow. The festival showcases a wide variety of projects from all around the globe, selecting and awarding young and emerging talents as well as internationally renowned artists.

“Equilibrium” is the last part of the 3D films trilogy we’ve dedicated to the earth. As the name implies, we started from the concept that everything natural on earth is conceived to coexist in an accurate and impeccable equilibrium.

In 2019 we had a great chance: to collaborate with Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura, giving life to a challenging cooperation with one of the architects that we admire the most, who recently passed away. 

As a process of project development in the second phase of the construction, we created an architectural animation for an iconic building of the master, the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University.  The construction is sited in Benguerir, Morocco, 50 miles north of Marrakech. Animation was a communication tool to test the ambients in a digital medium and ensure that the technical aspects of design faced the existing architecture and requirements from the client in a proper way.

Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura was commissioned to design the campus for Mohammed VI Polytechnic University in 2016. The masterplan is organised with a rational and geometric logic, defined by narrow streets, squares and a central axis. The scheme integrates courtyards, gardens, and semi-covered streets which encourage interactions between students and teachers, strengthening the sense of community.

Curious to see the film? Take a look here. 

Architect - Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura

Production - DIORAMA © 2019

Direction - Uros Vukovic

Music - Iz Svemira

In the late 1960s, director Michelangelo Antonioni asked the architect Dante Bini to design an exceptional villa in order to impress his lover, the extraordinary actress Monica Vitti. 

The two regularly visited "La Cupola" (The dome) located in the north of Sardinia, only for a short time, until the intermittent flame of their love went out. The building was later left to its destiny of abandonment, becoming a forgotten heritage.

This is our vision of "La Cupola" by Dante Bini, featuring Nyala Chair by Jomo Tariku. 

Guess what? Among the many projects going on, we also make clothes! Digital ones, of course.

The pandemic has been changing the way we live, the way we shop, the way we consume. We live in a time where the online world has become as important as the offline world, and part of our daily life is gradually moving into the metaverse.

Virtual clothing and 3D fashion represent the future of the fashion industry, and as a 3D production house we are excited to be among the actors of this change.

The latest occasion came up recently with Ba&sh, Parisian brand of prêt-à-porter. On the occasion of the Ba&sh Creative Lab, the maison asked us to model a series of dresses for a creative laboratory which invited the public to participate in the creation process of its next collection of summer party dresses. An original way to involve people in creating what they will wear, making them the protagonists of the fashion creative process.

Digital fashion is a virtual fashion experience that thrives on imagination and creativity, with sustainability at its core. It’s a renaissance movement in the fashion space, moving beyond the dynamics and rigidity of the traditional fashion system. In fact, with this initiative, the brand will only produce the dresses that people will actually buy and wear, without unnecessary waste.

This is only a small part of the many benefits of digital fashion…the possibilities are endless.

At Motel D, we continue the collaboration with our partner Kooness, the online marketplace featuring a curated selection of Contemporary Art from international art galleries. For this second exhibition, we will host a selection of artists working with flexible materials, natural and artificial fibers, and focusing on the urban landscape.

Just as the fibers intertwine and twist, giving life to something harmonious, Motel D aims to welcome the most varied creative minds based or passing through an increasingly international city, to create an opportunity for confrontation and union that can generate something new.

FIBER ART AND… THE CITY takes place from February 24th to April 7th 2022. Whether you are a club member or not, we are waiting for you to discover the exhibition (and our space!) during the vernissage on February 24th, from 6 to 9 pm.

Some weeks ago, while we were listening non-stop to the CIAO 2021 compilation, we received an unexpected call. Svetlana Magomedova, Soviet Bus Stops Federation account manager, complimented us for three images we created last year, inspired by its bus stops. She then asked us to go further with this idea: creating a campaign for the federation that could shed new light on the uniqueness and cultural value of these communist relics scattered in badlands within the former Iron Curtain.

If you’ve never heard about it, these mini-monuments were brought to the forefront by Christopher Herwig. The photographer has covered more than 30,000km by bus, bike, car and cab in 14 countries to snap bus stops that show the Soviet empire’s taste for the future fantastic, giving life to his two best-sellers photographic books. The Soviet bus stops are among the fetish architectures of the Soviet aesthetics. In fact, those structures could maintain their own autonomy under the regime, allowing architects and artists to freely experiment with one only constraint: to reflect the local culture.

Today, some of those unique transit structures are being repaired but most of them are neglected, abandoned to their fate just like the planet we live on. That’s why we took the opportunity to launch an important environmental message. Without moving away from scientists’ predictions, we imagined a post-apocalyptic future where the sea level has risen so much that the earth is completely flooded. In the midst of this catastrophe, the soviet bus stops, pop out of the water in all their beauty and grandeur, are the clearest symbol of our disengagement: we’ll have kept waiting, doing nothing to make things better, until the world is not livable anymore: Did we miss the last bus? Maybe these bizarre canopies will still be there, providing shelter to survivors.

We recently had the chance to share our experience (and some secrets!) with the guys of Fox Renderfarm. If curious to know a little more about us through Massi's words, find here a transcript of the article:

Fox Renderfarm: Hi Mr Massimiliano! Thank you and Diorama so much for accepting our interview again! Could you briefly introduce yourself and Diorama?

Massi: I’m Massi and at the moment I’m the COO and the Head of Still Images Department at Diorama. We are a 3D Production Company based between Milan and Paris, but nowadays we are becoming more and more of a cloud company with collaborators all over the world.

Fox Renderfarm: Diorama has progressed a lot, now you’ve set foot in the fashion and design industry. Could you share with us how Diorama has grown since 2019?

Massi: That’s true! Last time we had an interview together we were still rooted in the Architectural Visualization world, and we were in a peculiar moment of our story when we were starting to dip our toes in other industries. Today we have a lot of ongoing projects related to different businesses, from art to design, from fashion to cinema. We grew a lot during the pandemic as we could guarantee to our clients a structured remote team, able to work and perform from anywhere in the globe.

Fox Renderfarm: How is the pipeline of your production of still images and films respectively?

Massi: You didn’t mention that it would be a 5 hours’ talk! Jokes apart, the idea that revolutionized our workflow and our pipeline was to take inspiration from the big cinema productions. We tend as much as possible to divide a project in small segments which correspond to specific functions. Modeling, texturing, lighting and shading, post production, client management, IT support: those are separated tasks, done by specific teams made of people who love what they do.

Fox Renderfarm: Congrats on the award-winning short films, these 3 shorts are breathtakingly beautiful and photorealistic. Do these 3 shorts have some connection on the theme? Could you share the idea behind them a bit?

Massi: The Moon Codex is an ident video produced to express a critical thinking between an architect and a designer who were starting the collaboration. It all transforms to architecture and design in a certain way. The video is a short story on how the moon appeared in the universe, floating around Earth and having on it an enormous influence, which means life, culture and architecture.

Tempo d'acqua has been created for a discussion around the theme of sustainability for the Pisa Architecture Biennale. We had a fictional concept of traveling through different time frames where the Pisa tower was deep in the water two thousand years ago. There are many historical documents stating that the seashore moved 2km on the west, which means that fictive Pisa will once again be in the water as according to the scientific researches. It's a circle that never ends, and makes us think about the relationship of land-water-architecture.

Equilibrium, presented at La Biennale di Venezia, is the conclusive piece of the trilogy and aims to stimulate critical thinking about space and architecture. On the other hand, it has the intention to tell more about equality between objects in space, taking yet again a fictitious example of spatial equation between the earth, the moon and the water as a meaning of life.

Fox Renderfarm: In Equilibrium, there are tons of landscape elements, like rocks and mountains, lakes and rivers, forest, snow, and so forth. What’s the secret behind their realness?

Massi: Equilibrium is full CGI video, entirely created in 3D. The way of achieving realism are emotions. It is a very specific approach that all CG artists understand, once they achieve the look they were looking for. The realism doesn't come with realistic textures, but the feeling of mood and story behind the scene. Since Equilibrium had a deep thinking behind the curtains, we went further with simplicity. All those scenes are extremely simple in the sense of CG work; just a couple of animated planes, some of them were created in 2D compositing with a couple of animated layers, but they were all effective.

Fox Renderfarm: Water plays a very important role in Diorama’s artworks, did you meet any difficulty in simulating and rendering water? How did you solve these problems?

Massi: Water is a very important feature in our studio. We are constantly working on looks and better integration of water in our scenes. In Tempo d'acqua there are some scenes which took over a year to simulate, but they never emerged in the video. I guess one day we will publish them. Regarding simulations, I think that the liquid simulations are those which require the most time and resources. When it comes to water simulations, we tend to use Houdini. Most of our tools are custom made especially because the look doesn't come just out from the shell, in the drag-and-drop manner. It takes time to do multiple iterations, so the approach is usually to avoid tweaking parts of the simulation which could influence extreme simulation time dependence.

Fox Renderfarm: LIGHTFORLIFE shows Diorama’s profound insight and high level competence in handling textures. Could you respectively break down how you achieved the organic texture on the ice surface, the bokeh around the leaves, and smooth demonstration of the snakeskin-like texture?

Massi: The secret behind the look of the leaves is in making a very high focal length like macro photos, which creates this dynamic bokeh of reflections in the background. In this shot, we also had the intention to reach the look of an anamorphic lens by changing bokeh ration to something close to 0.7. Regarding the snake it is just a sweep object which rotates in multiple directions to achieve the organic look. Moreover the displacement texture that goes over is also animated to move in order to achieve the look of a living being. Metal reflections provide this important fill light from the side that brings attention to the shape and smoothness.

Fox Renderfarm: Diorama is so good at using wide angles to show grand views, while using close up to demonstrate details. Do you have any specific advice on the lighting design of these two aspects?

Massi: Understanding light is the key of a successful shot, both in still and in motion. Camera position, or it’s movement and lighting are elements that cannot be treated separately. Those are subsequent. Lighting shapes the geometry and the elements and can be mysterious or revealing just by changing a small parameter, and of course is a strong tool to drive the eye of the viewer. If you always tackle them as a duo, you can easily create amazing shots and have basically the power of showcasing the subject in it’s best version.

Fox Renderfarm: How did Diorama set the tone of its visual language and keep it coherent and consistent along the way?

Massi: You know, to be honest we tend to think that we are a heterogeneous company, when it comes to visual tone. We have such great artists, directing and producing, that it is really easy for us to get lost in their mood, their ideas and exploration, and this is in my opinion one of the keys to our success.The freedom to explore. We do not want to be such a company that produces always the same visuals, with the same style, both clients (the good ones) and the team influence our production a lot. When looking at new artists, almost unconsciously, we are approached and we look to a kindred spirit that in some ways have something in common with our general vision about art, and this job. Guess that’s our secret.

Fox Renderfarm: Technically and management-wise, did Diorama do anything to optimize the efficiency in production?

Massi: We started to implement the management team in an early stage, around 2017. We needed to have a lean and flexible art team, leaving to the artists the freedom to spend time doing what they like. We don’t want our collaborators to waste time answering emails or struggling with skill sets which they do not have and are not interested in.

Fox Renderfarm: How did you encounter CG? Could you share your educational and career experience with us?

Massi: As for some of my fields, my roots are in Architecture. I’ve studied Architecture in Florence, and in 2013 I moved to France for my Erasmus. That’s where I discovered this work called visualizer, or perspectiviste, as they call it in France. I got hooked and I started looking into that. After coming back to Italy and taking my degree, I spent one year in Poland. I worked for a small company where I spent great days improving as a post producer and moving my first steps in 3D. In 2016 I met Gilberto, CEO of Diorama, together with Gianni, our actual CFO; they were starting their own company between Paris and Milan. At that time Diorama didn’t even exist, it was just a few chairs and four artists; Uros was one of them, and I became the fifth. From that day we had a lot of fun together and we grew bigger until now, with about 30 people gravitating around the Diorama ecosystem.

Fox Renderfarm: In your opinion, what are the qualities that make a good 3D artist better?

Massi: Exploration and research. We are kind of artists/professionals who are tasked with depicting a different reality every single day. The challenge can one day be a room, the day after a space colony and the next one an underwater shot. Exploring techniques, new forms of art, new softwares, and new media must be a constant in our work. Picasso used to say that good artists copy, great artists steal. That’s my constant mantra. Looking into other people’s work, select some interesting elements, digest them and incorporate them into my own.

Fox Renderfarm: Any artist or artwork that inspires you the most?

Massi: The list risks to be really long, as per I personally find such new great artists every day and I love to explore how their mind works. As you may see, Diorama aesthetic tend to detach from the 3D feel, looking more into an artistic and minimal way of picturing things.I know for sure that me and Uros, and our team in general, are big fans of Ash Thorp; his cinematic look is what drives most of our research. What I personally tend to do is to look a lot into other media. I should mention Raphael Lacoste, great concept artist, art director and friend, who drove my entire career as an artist as a constant source of inspiration.

Fox Renderfarm: Do you have any career advice to the newbies in the CG industry? And what did you do to improve your technique skills and aesthetic sense?

Massi: This actually connects to your previous question. Even after years of experience you must in some ways consider yourself as a newbie if you do not want to stop growing and learning. This spirit is a constant approach for Diorama. For people who approach image production in CG, my best advice is to look into photography and filmmaking. Do not get inspired by CG when doing CG: you can easily get stuck in someone else's style, and the goal for someone starting should be to find their own. Photographers are an important part of the moodboard we build in the Image Department for each project. I tend to oblige the team to propose photos more than other renders as a source of inspiration (I would also love clients to do that!).

Fox Renderfarm: How do you feel about the cloud rendering services of Fox Renderfarm?

Massi: Amazing, what else can we say about it! You guys rock, what's the secret of the kindness of your support at 3 AM? Jokes apart, we couldn’t be able to be so on time and productive without Fox, you are almost part of the team at the moment, and we are so glad to have this great relationship!

Fox Renderfarm: Any other things you want to share with the CG enthusiasts?

Massi: Do not spend too much time on social media; Canaletto didn’t have one and was doing great things. Use them for sharing kitties or barbecue, or the ugly sweater your aunt gave you for Christmas. But do not get in the loop of producing art just to follow an algorithm. Be driven by passion, do what you like, when you like. If it is personal work, spend all the time you want on it, show it to your friends and to people who can really give an honest opinion about it. If it is commercial, push your client and yourself beyond the limits and try to do the best before the deadline hits…I guess Fox Renderfarm can help you a lot with that!

Last week we had fun creating and sharing a fake campaign for the Soviet Bus Stops Federation, imagining they asked us to shed new light on the uniqueness and cultural value of its transit structures.

Not only there is no federation, but above all we would never accept a commission from an entity related to a regime that uses violence to impose its ideas, as we are sadly seeing these days.

We just think that there are a lot of little architectural underdogs out there that should be celebrated, and we fell in love with these soviet art installations. Relocating them in a post-apocalyptic future, we took the chance to launch an environmental message in which we truly believe: we need to stop waiting for things to change by themselves, and to start doing something now, both individually and collectively. We can wait as long as we want under one of these majestic bus stops...that of salvation will have already passed.

You can buy and collect our images inspired by real structures in the territory of the former USSR in the form of digital artworks. In fact, with the Bus Stops series we make our official entry into the world of NFTs. Take a look on OpenSea!

Stay tuned on Instagram to be updated. New editions are coming up!

The launch of our first NFTs series, set in the territories of the former USSR, coincided with the beginning of a war, which we have been helpless witnessing for days.

Among the bus stops structures we have selected and relocated in a post-apocalyptic scenario where the sea level has risen so much that the earth is completely flooded, there is one that is actually located in the north west of Ukraine, in Shlyakhtyntsi, Ternopil's district.

Therefore we have decided that the proceeds of the sale of the digital artwork we have created from this image will be entirely donated to the Ukrainian Red Cross Society.

You can find Shlyakhtyntsi, the second piece of the Bus Stops series, here on OpenSea.

#standwithukraine

As you saw in the previous Bus Stops series, which also marked our entry into the world of NFTs, we decided to move into a post-apocalyptic future where water has completely submerged the earth. We then asked ourselves: what could be left? And since we fell in love with these architectural underdogs within the former Iron Curtain, we placed them in the middle of the ocean between clouds and fog. In this unspecified future there is no trace of human beings.

We now continue the journey through this infinite expanse of dark water, exploring a land transformed into an ocean planet. After miles and miles, something appears on the horizon. The lightning, the storms and the rain subside, whilst a shape stands out against the background: it is an island. Perhaps a piece of the earth's surface that somehow has managed to stay afloat, or the summit of a very high mountain range that the water was not able to cover completely.

Of course, there is no one to ask for information: we only know that something else survived the catastrophe. An unspecified place that we will call Some-w[h]ere.

We first explore it from afar, then we get closer, looking through the mountainous shapes and the arid land. It seems like there is absolutely nothing: just sand blown by the wind, the silhouettes of some bare trees, a light that is somehow ethereal. What is this place? But above all: is anyone here?

Nobody knows for the moment: just enjoy the view.

Another interview for our COO and Head of Still Images Department, Massimiliano Napoli. This time, we had the pleasure of having a chat with the guys from Helio, a Zürich-based startup with a compelling vision for global sustainable computing.

It is an evidence: in 2022, minimizing our impact on the planet in everything we do is more necessary than ever (if we don’t want to go straight to the apocalypse). We love our work and want to continue doing it, but in the most sustainable way possible.

As the industry colleagues and the most experienced already know, data centers emit as much carbon dioxide as the air travel industry. More than that, 80-90% of global server capacity sits idle, wasting energy and money. Helio Cloud Rendering matches sellers with spare compute capacity with buyers, who can run workloads at cheaper prices.

Therefore, as well as offering other benefits such as speed, the startup demonstrates that better resource utilisation can significantly reduce the industry contributions to global warming, and we are proud to be part of this change.

You can find the complete interview and the case-study of which we are the protagonists at this link.

There is a garden where time flows differently and the night is long and sweet. Dawn is far away, or maybe it doesn't even exist. Everything is shrouded in mystery, an eerie calm which fascinates and is not scary.

We enter a forest of olive trees whose trunks climb into the air, rolling up on themselves. These sacred trees, created by Athena to bless men, are struck by the celestial light of the full moon, which rays are as powerful as those of the sun. Their sharp leaves sway, caressed by the night breeze. The animals of the darkness awaken, howl, sing. The only company in this ethereal place, clouds of fireflies dispersed in the air, poppies and daisies that rest their tired petals. And then, a shimmering pool in which we dive and swim and swim again, without ever finding the bottom.

#staytuned on our Instagram to find out more.

Remember Some-w[h]ere, the mysterious island we told you about? Coming from the sea, we explored it from afar, and then slowly approached it. And now, we have arrived.

During the day, when the rays of the sun alternate with a thin fog, we cannot hear or see anyone. But at nightfall something moves in the middle of the sea: mysterious avatars are being born. A ray of light shapes their face, outlining their fine features. We witness this enigmatic avatarizing process in an indefinite laboratory between the water and the starry sky.

After Bus Stops, Avatarizing is our second NFT collection. A mini-series composed of three subjects which are the protagonists of a creation process, and will be ready soon to take their first steps in this parallel universe.

You will find the collection on Foundation. 

Stay tuned on our social channels for updates!

Digital reality means fusion between the physical and the numerical world, in order to create a universe that transcends the concrete but of which we can have a direct experience.

A few months ago, we had the pleasure of collaborating with the architects duo Rousseau & Dapelo to create an immersive video installation for the opening of the new DG Casa boutique in Corso Venezia 7, Milan. Inside the store, an immersive room envelops the viewer in the dreamy atmosphere of the brand's new collection designed for the home, inspired by the most iconic elements of Dolce&Gabbana, from Carretto and Blu Mediterraneo to Zebra and Leopardo.

To see the video we produced in its immersive version, rendez-vous on site! Otherwise, take a look here. 

Surprise! This year we were invited by Lito to take part in the 6th edition of VivaTech, Europe’s biggest startup and tech event taking place in Paris from June 15 to 18.

Our CEO and Creative Director Gilberto will be among the speakers in a talk about art, tech and how web 3 is revolutionizing the industry. Together with him there will be Nathan Clements-Gillespie from Lito & Frieze Masters and Ariel Hudes from Pace Gallery.

See you at stage 3 on June 16th, from 12:40 to 13:00 pm!

Federico Biancullo, founder of ctrlz blog and Big Picture Visual studio, invited us to participate in his podcast dedicated to the archviz world. There's Something about Archviz is a series of informal conversations with industry leaders and experts, aimed at delivering insight and knowledge on hot topics connected with the field of archviz.

In this episode, our COO and Head of Still Images Department Massimiliano Napoli tells how we ditched the physical office model and went full remote, both from a technical and a management standpoint. He discusses the lessons learned during the pandemic, and the advantages and limitations of a "cloud office" model. The episode also touches on the topics of healthy teamwork and on the power of freelancing connected to the remote business model in archviz.

You can find There's Something about Archviz on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Youtube, Google Podcasts and Radiopublic. 

We’re grateful to Federico for this opportunity, and excited to share our experience with anyone who wants to listen!

July 1st was a special day: for the first time in many months, we all (or almost all) gathered in our headquarters Motel D, in Milan. In fact, after the pandemic we became a 100% cloud company, so our team and collaborators are all scattered around the world: from Italy to Serbia, from France to Portugal, from Holland to Montenegro.

Sometimes we need to remove the screen that separates us and be physically together. Diorama Day was the perfect occasion to celebrate all the work done so far, share important news, talk about future ambitions, distribute the new branded merchandise but also have a lot of fun entering the sets we have created ourselves (among other things)!

Can’t wait for the next Diorama Day.

An innovative sustainable material, its application on furnishing elements, some iconic Autogrill's architectures: with these three elements we have created a virtual experience. 

The occasion? The presentation, at Motel D Milano, of the Wasbottle material, produced by Bencore in partnership with Autogrill from recycled and recyclable plastic flakes.

A table, a bookcase and two benchs are contextualized in an ethereal scenario in dialogue with three architectures that evoke the iconic Autogrill's structures - the user freely moves in this limbo, exploring the three scenes. Isn’t that more engaging than simple images?

Click here to see the teaser. 

Something cool is happening this week! Mohole, Cinema, Communication and Storytelling school based in Milan, asked us to help them evaluate their students during this year’s 3D course examination.

On July 13th our COO and Head of Still Images Department Massimiliano and our Art Director Jacopo will be external examiners; we hope they won't be too strict!

Photo © scuola mohole 

Last Wednesday we were invited by Mohole, Cinema, Communication and Storytelling school based in Milan, to be external examiners during this year's 3D exam.

Our COO and Head of Still Images Department Massimiliano and our Art Director Jacopo, together with the teachers from the 3D course, viewed the students' end-of-two-year showreels, intervening (almost) always to congratuale them. They saw very high quality works and noticed some talent that stands out among the others...Who knows? Maybe we will meet again sooner or later!

Photo © scuola mohole 

When someone new enters Diorama, we like to welcome them properly. Each employee receives our onboarding package, consisting of a set of useful objects branded with our logo and our new baseline Digital Realities. Strictly total black, of course.

Whilst conceiving it, we chose four elements taking into account an important feature, which we think we can no longer ignore: eco-sustainability.

The t-shirt and the shopper are made of 100% organic cotton, the pages of the agenda are made of recycled paper, while, (big shot!) the power bank is solar-powered; we just need to expose it to the sun for a few hours and then use it to recharge our inseparable devices.

We like to think that our team and collaborators feel like they are part of Diorama as they are members of a family whose values they can share. 

(The table at Motel D Milano is made of Wasbottle by Bencore developed with Autogrill from recycled plastic).

At Diorama our projects span across a huge variety of disciplines and purposes - we truly do a lot of things! How to encompass this broad range in one sentence? We decided to simplify it in two words, which mix and complement one another. From now on, Diorama will be accompanied by the payoff Digital Realities.

That’s who we are. We cross material and immaterial, nature and artifice, tangible and intangible to create new worlds. We draw on the imagination (ours and yours) to give life to virtual universes that exist in the digital sphere and therefore become reality.

To explain the concept we took an element of nature and tangible reality, the mountain, and we contextualised it into three situations in which it reveals its ambiguity between the physical and the digital world.

The first one represents what is seemingly a real mountain… but which actually turns out to be a diorama, a fictitious landscape contained in a box. A digital image which seems natural but is, in fact, surreal - a great summary of our aesthetic and purpose.

We blur digital possibilities and perceptions of reality, bringing a bit of each in both.

Stay tuned on our social media channels to discover the other two elements of the campaign and its future developments…including a surprise!

Exciting news! Our NFT Pitsunda II from the Bus Stops NFT collection has been selected and will be presented at NFT | New Media | Experimental | Digital Arts Film Festival by Worldwide Cineastes Film Festival in London. 

The festival focuses on exploring new media through innovation, originality and new technologies that are emerging in the 21st century. The occasion is unique in its style and focuses on different categories of the most inventive contemporary genres of visual and filmic or cinematic expressions.

You around? Click here to book a place.

As Diorama’s Film branch is based in Serbia, we are particularly thrilled to be taking part in the Design Week Novi Sad this Fall as official partners!

NSDW is part of the Novi Sad European Capital of Culture project which aims to collect and present ideas by over 300 creatives from across Serbia and the world, through group and solo exhibitions, space installations, workshops for artists, lectures by the world’s most important names from the design scene and a lot more.

From September 30 to October 7, you will find us at the famous SPENS, in the heart of Novi Sad. Our Film Director Uros will hold a lecture about architecture films as well as taking part in a podcast, while between October 1st- 3rd we will be the protagonists of an exhibition presenting an exclusive selection of our works.

We are looking forward to flying to Novi Sad and meeting other professionals from creative industries. Stay tuned on our channels to find out more!

Young Eyes, Young Souls: a Youthful Take on Contemporary Photography is the new exhibition born from the collaboration between Looking for Art, Motel D and Kooness on the occasion of the Milano Photofestival 2022.

The exhibition aims at giving a choral vision, made of contrasts and harmonies, on contemporary photography interpreted by a selection of artists all strictly Under 35. The exhibition is part of the programme of the 17th edition of Photofestival, that offers a rich programme of events spread throughout the metropolitan area of Milan.

We wait for you at the opening that will take place on the 14th of September at our Club in Viale Caldara 13, from 7pm!

Don’t you know Motel D Milano yet? Here we explained what it is.

Great news from London, which becomes the world's center of design from Sept. 17-25 with the 20th edition of London Design Festival.

On Tuesday 20th September, in the beautiful setting of House of Koko, Open-ended Design will host the Technology & Design Lab,  the first iteration of a forward-looking cultural experience curated by Suhair Khan.

We are proud to support the event in person along with WeTransfer, Gaia Art Foundation, lito.io and House of KOKO. At 5:30 pm, our Executive Director Mariasole Pastori will be speaking with Diana Alcausin (WeTransfer), Maxim Zhestkov and Emily Benn about Creativity, Digital Platforms and Ethics.

Given our craft, we couldn't help but participate in the event visually as well: following the theme of Design and Technology at large, we have created a series of images, generated via AI using Midjourney, that will serve as the identity of the event and as a backdrop for the various talks.

We are thrilled and honoured to take part in such a significant event that encourages impactful change!

How to bring personality into a technical film? Although architectural animations exist for the sole purpose of showing the artificial appearance of projects, the viewing audience also has the right to experience visual sensations and emotions, appreciating an architectural film as a work of art in its own right. This is a complex goal for a film director who must also meet the technical requirements of the client.

Our film director Uroš Vuković will talk about his experience in reconciling technique and art, and much more, during the Design Week Novi Sad. Don't miss his lecture titled Architecture on Film on Saturday, October 1st, in the 6pm lecture block, in the amphitheater of SPENS.

We're happy and honoured to be official partners of the event, part of Applied Arts Week of Kaleidoskop Kulture and supported by Novi Sad 2022. 

Shortly after the London Design Festival and at the same time as Design Week Novi Sad, we also travel to Calabria. From 30 September to 4 October, the region will host the first edition of the Biennale dello Stretto, born from an initiative of architect Alfonso Femia and Mediterranei Invisibili to create an opportunity to meet and debate around the theme of the Mediterranean, right at the border between Calabria and Sicily.

We are delighted to participate in this event with two of our works. The first one is a trilogy, the union of the three films we made together with Atelier(s) Alfonso Femia, and which have toured festivals around the world: The Moon Codex, Tempo d’acqua (Time of Water) and Equilibrium. The second is instead an ex-novo work that represents the intro of the kermesse; it is called Confluenze and through the element of water reflects on the contamination between different realities that coexist in the same territory. Both will be exhibited in the splendid setting of Forte Batteria Siacci in Campo Calabro.

See you by the sea!

As you surely already know, this year we are official partners of Design Week Novi Sad, launched on the occasion of Novi Sad European Capital of Culture 2022 and organised by the Pdp Conference. Among other things, from September 30 to October 7 we will be presenting the exhibition The power of 3D at SPENS.

What is it about? Here’s the description:

With the physical world moving more and more into the virtual orbit, brands are turning to 3D studios to create immediate and effective visual products, shaping ideas and insights. From the architectural field to the world of fashion, Diorama is specialised in the creation of digital assets, offering to brands a solid expertise and a defined artistic direction. From animations presenting an architectural project to those that anticipate a fashion collection, passing through artistic films focused on nature, the exhibition offers a journey into Diorama’s universe, straddling reality and imagination.

#staytuned on our socials!

After being in London, our NFT Pitsunda II from the Bus Stops series flies straight to New York!

The work was selected by Lowkey Giant for the 15th edition of the Bushwick Film Festival Metaverse Experience, that will run in tandem with the IRL festival in Brooklyn, NY! The bus stop will be exhibited in the Metaverse gallery from Nov. 1 to Nov. 7. You can explore it at this link. 

We thank the festival selection team for this great opportunity! See you in the Metaverse.  

What a big night! On 19 October we had the immense pleasure of flying to Fotografiska in New York to attend the global launch of Mortlach’s 30-year old Midnight Malt.

For the occasion we created an animation that was screened during the VIC & VIP dinner. With a conceptual approach, it shows the distillation process as a work of art: following the journey of a drop, we made a parallel between how time flows and the liquid flows in the distillation process, with a moment of stillness to underline the 30 year-long wait necessary to obtain the exclusive Midnight Malt.

#staytuned to see it, soon published on our website and social channels.

Have you noticed? We have recently launched our new payoff Digital Realities! To do that, we have created a campaign consisting of three animations that decline the theme through a specific subject: the mountain. You can find it on our social networks.

Now it's your turn! Are you a 3D artist? We invite you to freely interpret the theme through a single image, a series or an animation. You can use any software, as long as it is made in 3D (illegal downloading of models prohibited!). You have until December 19, 2022 to send your proposal to us@diorama.eu with the subject DIGITAL REALITIES - OPEN CALL.

The finalists, which we will announce on January 9, will be posted on our social networks. The winner will be revealed on the 12th and will have the chance to work with us on a project.

Can't wait to see what your wild imagination gives birth to!

Here we go finally! On November 19 at 5 pm rendezvous at Martinelli Luce’s showroom in Lucca to discover and explore the metaverse we created for the company on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Elio Martinelli’s birth. The experience winds through different settings to discover the history of Elio and Martinelli Luce, from its origins to the late 1990s.

Our art director Jacopo Rosano and our production manager Pietro de Pasca will be speaking together with president Emiliana Martinelli.

See you in Lucca, and/or in the metaverse of Martinelli Luce.

We were recently invited by Andrea Mancuso, Lecturer of the Project Culture Course at the NABA, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, Milan Campus, MA in Interior Design to speak about a topic that is now at the heart of our work: the metaverse. 

Between October and November, our COO Massimiliano Napoli, our art director Jacopo Rosano and our CGI artist Giuliano Bora have held a series of lectures called Design for the metaverse. 

The classes started with some theory, studying the birth and development of the metaverse and analyzing some online experiences, and then moved on to practice by learning the Unreal software and connecting with VR through the Oculus visor.

We are grateful to NABA for welcoming us and letting us share our expertise on the metaverse topic. 

Stay tuned to find out about future developments of this collaboration. 

The deadline for our Digital Realities Open Call is postponed until next year! 

Are you a 3D artist? We invite you to freely interpret the Digital Realities theme through a single image, a series or an animation. You can use any software, as long as it is made in 3D (illegal downloading of models prohibited!).

You have until January 9, 2023 to send your proposal to us@diorama.eu with the subject DIGITAL REALITIES - OPEN CALL.

The winner will be revealed on the 16th and will have the chance to work with us on a project.

#staytuned

Like every year, the last days of December are an opportunity to look back and take stock of the past months before diving head into the new year. This 2022 has also been a year full of first times and great achievements.

First of all, in February we launched our first NFT series called Bus Stops, for sale on Opensea, which throughout the year was exhibited at festivals in London and New York. It was followed shortly after by the Avatarizing series, that you can find on Foundation.

As we have been doing for years now, we worked closely with Bureau Betak to create the previews for some of its most important fashion shows, and with Bureau Future with an animation for Berluti. And again, we made a video for D&G on the occasion of the opening of the d&g casa store in Milan.

In June, our Ceo and Creative Director Gilberto took part in Viva Tech Paris in a talk about art, tech and how web 3 is revolutionizing the industry, while in July we all met at Motel D in Milan for the first edition of Diorama Day. We even went back to school, invited by Andrea Mancuso to held a series of lectures called “Design for the metaverse” whithin his course at NABA.

We then dropped by London Design Festival, where our Executive Director Mariasole spoke about Creativity, Digital Platforms and Ethics. At Design Week Novi Sad, our Film Director Uros explained how to bring cinematography in Archtectural Visualizations.

We then flew to New York to present our animation for Mortlach on the occasion of the launch of its 30yo Midnight Malt. We created the first virtual experience for Bencore, and especially the Metaverse Martinelli Luce, which explores the history of the brand on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Elio Martinelli’s birth.

In addition to the partnership with Helio, we took sustainability a step further by signing up for the Green Future Project (which we will tell you about soon) and we closed off the year in Miami for upcoming projects.

Bye bye 2022, you can hardly say we were bored.

The city of love is calling us! Tomorrow we are excited to participate in a new conference by AV3. 

Our CEO & Creative Director Gilberto Bonelli and our CFO & General Manager Gianni Vesentini will talk about digital realities together with architectural photographer and professor Marco Introini, in a dialogue concerning the narrative of places and architectures between the real and the artificial. 

See you at 6 pm in Via Santa Teresa 2, Verona.

Last November we launched our first open call addressed to 3D artists from around the world, with the theme Digital realities. We received many interesting and varied proposals, and we were surprised to see how everyone unleashed their creativity and technical expertise.

After careful consideration, we chose three finalists: Alberto Cittone, Ivan Bellezza, and Daniele De Gregorio. To clear our head, we also asked the public for help: the survey saw Ivan Bellezza triumph with 40% of the votes.

We are thrilled to announce that the survey confirmed our decision...Ivan Bellezza is the winner of the open call! Like us, Ivan chose the subject of the mountain, but was able to decline it in a new and unexpected way. In his animation, he immediately reveals the artifice that makes the mountain unreal, and then shows how that mountain can become reality. Through movements and music, he creates a dance that perfectly represents the combination and contrast between real and digital.

Ivan will be working with us on a special project.

Thanks to all participants and congratulations to the other two finalists.

We are looking forward to the next open call!

© Ivan Bellezza

We are honoured to be official partners of a new exciting initiative: Meet Arch! Meet Arch is a 3-day workshop about architecture, design, visualisation and retail addressed to students and young professionals. The event, whose aim is to create new new networks of contacts and possible future collaborations, will be held in Florence during the month of May. 

Our production manager Pietro de Pasca will be among the tutors together with 34 other architects and designers from internationally renowned studios.

More details soon!

Last November we launched the metaverse we created for Martinelli Luce on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Elio Martinelli’s birth. The experience winds through different settings to discover the history of Elio and Martinelli Luce, from its origins to the late 1990s.

With the “New Products” virtual space, the experience expands, transporting the visitor to a new section of the metaverse dedicated to some of the latest creations of the lighting design leader. 

Enjoy the experience.