Osservanza Imola: a former asylum you can explore in 3D

The problem

For over a century the Osservanza complex was Imola's psychiatric hospital. Today it reopens as a Park of Knowledge and Innovation: public offices, a startup hub, a music academy, a museum laboratory on the memory of asylum care. The Nuovo Circondario Imolese, the local authority association, and the City of Imola asked us to give this transformation a single voice, able to speak at once to residents, institutions and businesses.

How we solved it

The visual identity starts from the architecture: the volumes of the pavilions, the orthogonal plan, the rational layout of the complex. From there, a rigorous grid and a system of essential geometries, inside which colour fields and modular compositions leave room for variation. The logomark recombines the O of Osservanza and the I of Imola as structural forms rather than decorative ones. Together with Caterina Appignani we built the palette, the typography, the iconographic system, the animations and the brand manual that holds it all together.

The website is the permanent home of that story: Next.js, content managed in DatoCMS, bilingual in Italian and English, with pages for the individual places, the events calendar and the news archive. At its centre is a navigable 3D model of the complex, built on surveys carried out with Riccardo Foschi of the Department of Architecture at the University of Bologna: from the browser you can cross the park and step into its most striking spaces before ever having seen them in person.

The social communication moves on five pillars, memory, transformation, vision, participation, identity, with around three posts a week on Instagram and Facebook. Black and white archive photographs alongside work in progress, infographics on the numbers behind the regeneration, four video formats including walks along the avenues with people who actually lived the Osservanza. The plan accompanied the city from December 2025 through the identity reveal at a press conference, and on to the openings in March and April 2026.

From the city of the mad to a city for everyone.

The results

Within a few months the MIIX, the LIMI, the new headquarters of the Nuovo Circondario Imolese, the Incontri col Maestro International Academy and the Centralina all opened. Every opening entered the website and the feed as a chapter of the same story: not the running commentary of a building site, but a place becoming somewhere you can walk through again.