Archive of imagined spaces

Rooms that do not exist.

CRANEO 3D is the rendering practice of an architect based in Mexico. Each work is a room built from light, stone and silence, and kept as a single photograph.

View the archivePrints
Teal Salon, view 1: Fluted walls, sheer curtains and a teal table.
Teal Salon (No. 001), 2026Blender · Cycles

One room, three states

Every room starts as a white model. Light is fixed first; materials come last. Change the materials and the same room tells a different story.

See the room
Ochre Study as a white clay model Ochre Study with ochre and orange materials Ochre Study with red, blue and yellow furniture No. 005 · Ochre

Archive

5 rooms · 14 images

Prints

Opening soon on INPRNT

Selected rooms are printed as archival pigment prints on cotton rag paper, signed and numbered by hand.

  • PaperCotton rag, matte
  • Sizes30 × 30 · 50 × 50 cm
  • EditionNumbered, 30 per size
  • Printed byINPRNT, USA
Follow for the releaseJoin the print list
Green Room Yellow Hour
Night Table Green Room

Blender scenes

Superhive

The complete file behind an image: the room, its light and its cameras, ready to render in Cycles.

  • SoftwareBlender · Cycles
  • IncludesCameras, light, materials
  • New scenesCC0 and original assets
  • Catalogue30+ scenes and kits
Browse on Superhive
CRANEO 3D skull mark

About

Mexico

I trained as an architect in Mexico and I work in Blender. CRANEO 3D is where I build the rooms I cannot build on a site: one source of light, a few honest materials, and time.

Craneo means skull in Spanish. The skull is drawn by hand; the letters are drawn with a ruler. I sign the work with the studio name and keep my own out of it: the rooms should speak first.

Less, but better. Honest, but warm. Systematic, but melancholic. Made to last.

Influences

What the rooms are made of

The archive is built from a few convictions and a longer list of teachers. None of them is copied; each one taught me where to look.

Architecture
Luis Barragán and Juan O'Gorman, for walls and colour in Mexican light. Tadao Ando, Louis Kahn and Peter Zumthor, for silence, weight and atmosphere. Carlo Scarpa, for the joint where two materials meet.
Painting
Edward Hopper and Vilhelm Hammershøi, for empty rooms that still feel inhabited. Mark Rothko, for colour as a place to stand in. René Magritte, for a daylight that should not be possible.
Film and photography
Ron Cobb's work on Alien and the city of Blade Runner, for a future that has been lived in. Andrei Tarkovsky and Roger Deakins, for time and light. Gregory Crewdson and Todd Hido, for the stillness just before something happens.
Japan
Jun'ichirō Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows. Ma, the space left empty so a room can breathe, and wabi-sabi, the dignity of things that age.
Design
Dieter Rams and the Swiss grid, for the discipline of less. Every room starts as a white model and earns each material it gets.