I · 6Olivetti2020

Olivetti made typewriters and accounting machines, and along the way became one of the most closely studied design cultures of the twentieth century: products, posters, showrooms, factories, and a particular way of working.

The book gathers archival images, essays and documents into an overview, each source a different point of view on the same company, laid side by side rather than resolved into one story. The reader is taken back in time by accumulation, given enough material that the company comes into focus on its own.

One thread runs through all of it: Olivetti designed for its workers as carefully as for its customers. Under Adriano Olivetti, the factory town of Ivrea gained housing, libraries, childcare and canteens, many by leading architects of the day, decades before the tech campus made the idea familiar. At Olivetti, design included the people doing the work.

Most of the work is research. Hundreds of archives, images and texts were read through to arrive at what remains.