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Olivetti as a meeting place, as a concept of space, as a model of society. The architectures of one of the most famous Italian companies in the world are still today an example and source of inspiration for a “good life”. Factories that include residential areas, playgrounds, nurseries and libraries. Offices and shops that appear as a business card to present the company in its values, even before a commercial sales strategy. In the name of innovation and beauty, workplaces for production and – always – also social environments for relationships.
Adriano Olivetti Foundation
In this sense, the Olivetti company was not only a company that with its calculators and typewriters marked the history of the twentieth century, but also a real workshop of that “City of Man” That Adriano Olivetti he never tired of building.
At the helm of the company founded by his father, from 1932 until his death in 1960, Adriano Olivetti was among the first Italian entrepreneurs to entrust prestigious architects the realization of his Company Headquarters. Able to recognize, beyond the mere productive function, an essential and no less important aesthetic function.
Foto Andreafist – Wikimedia Commons
A client of factories, offices and shops, in Italy and around the world – from his hometown of Ivrea to America, Brazil and Japan – names of the calibre of Luigi Figini and Gino Pollini, Luigi Cosenza, Marco Zanuso, Carlo Scarpa, Franco Albini, Gae Aulenti, Renzo Piano, and then again, Louis Kahn, Egon Eiermann, Kenzo Tange and many others gravitated around him and his idea of the city.
And it is precisely to engineers and architects, not only to factory and field workers, that he addressed his spiritual testament, City of Man: «It is you who, giving life to the modern world, shape into living reality the ideals that each person carries in their heart».
The following are his architectures for a better world.
Source: living.corriere.it
