Today's home, in a certain sense, is still a 'den', that is to say, a simple and primordial system of defense and isolation from the outside world perceived as hostile and dangerous. But the home is also a 'hive', an integrated and intricate system of single units inserted within much greater conglomerations (buildings, districts) that require increasingly complex communication systems with the outside world.
These days, planning an intervideocom system for the home means trying to reconcile defense with access, closure with openness; it means mediating between opposing and contrasting necessities.

In 1997, at the request of BPT, the leading Italian company in videointercom production, VillaTosca organized a Competition Workshop entitled 'The Den and the Hive' centered around planning innovative videointercom systems.
The Workshop was held in Venice, a city with two fold nature: earth and water, defensive bastion and patrician residence. Four different design studios participated in the Workshop, as well as numerous researchers and scholars.

At the end of the Workshop, two different videointercom projects were selected among the many proposals, all of which were different and interesting.
The solutions born of this Competition Workshop were aimed at new answers to the problems of face to face communication at a distance and enabled the customer company to offer useful, discreet, modular videointercoms able to guarantee the home privacy and security, as well as an integration with the outside world.