Olivetti e Ivrea, l’altra faccia della Luna

The name Olivetti has the vintage taste of the very first computers and typewriters which are today cult objects. But more than a brand, Olivetti seems to own the geographic consistency of a population, the community that Camillo and Adriano Olivetti built around their industry in Ivrea. There Adriano instructs the best architects to built a new city, acting like a Renaissance prince, making of Ivrea a “Mecca of modern architecture” and a place attracting the best artists, intellectuals, scientists. Olivetti produces type-writers, which are culture-writers, a product needing preparation and boosting new education. Adriano asks his employees for work in exchange for any kind of social services and, particularly, for training. In the belief that culture is freedom. Ivrea becomes a parallel State, organized accordingly to the principles of a new ideal Humanism in the age of industry. The person is the aim of the research activity and the dimensional scale of all the programs carried by Adriano. At Olivetti design (Nizzoli, Sottsass, Bellini, etc) means to trigger a relationship between person and electronics, reaching to create the first personal computer in the world. Architecture (Figini-Pollini, Gardella, BBPR, Zanuso, Cosenza, etc) aims to reconnect land to industry in order to create a new relationship between industry and humanity. Architecture in Ivrea is aked to be an invisible connector of man to community; of community to industry; of industry to land. The tens of architectural showrooms in the world are asked to extend the Ivrea model from the person as a producer to the person as an addressee.