in the industrial city
Discover the city on foot
Via Jervis is the beating heart of the Olivetti industrial district, part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site recognized for the outstanding value of its industrial architecture and the visionary social project that inspired it—Adriano Olivetti’s.
Since 2018, Ivrea has officially been recognized as the “20th-Century Industrial City” UNESCO World Heritage Site. In 2026, the MaAM – the Open-Air Museum of Olivetti Architecture, which for years has guided residents and visitors through the so-called core zone, has evolved into the new “20th-Century Industrial City” itinerary. Through updated stories, audio content, and a refreshed visual identity, we invite you to explore one of the most inspiring chapters of the 20th century—one that still offers valuable lessons for the future. Because, as someone once wrote, “in Ivrea, the future lives trapped in the past.”
The itinerary in the industrial city
Red-Brick Factory
At the end of the nineteenth century, a young engineer, called Camillo, envisioned a factory standing in a meadow. He saw it, that is, he imagined it. And then he built it, setting in motion, without realizing it, the most remarkable industrial story of the century about to be born. Every flight begins from a nest. This one is made of red bricks.
Olivetti Crèche
Among the many services designed by the company for employees and their children, the Olivetti Nursery School stands out. Great ideas always seem simple once they have been formulated. Like this one: to build a community on a human scale, one must design places on a child’s scale. Places to grow and imagine.
Borgo Olivetti Social Housing
Much can be learned from Olivetti’s architecture by exploring its purposes, styles and materials. But those who listen to buildings like this one can hear it whisper one thing above all: “balance between work and life, between city and nature, between the useful and the beautiful has been, is and will always be possible.”
Social Services Center
“The man who spends the long day in the workshop does not seal his humanity inside his overalls.” We are not only what we do, in the words of Adriano Olivetti. For this reason, among hexagonal columns, light wells, carefully selected plants and colored walls, the place dedicated to the well-being of workers resembles a temple.
ICO Workshops
“In the light of day”, we say of something that has no secrets: like the work carried out in these transparent workshops, with their glass walls, known throughout the world. They were born from the restless mind of the young Adriano Olivetti as an industrialist: “the factory for man, not man for the factory.” And the message matters more than the monument.
Heating Plant
The presence of colours, the stained-glass windows, a certain feminine grace for a building that would otherwise have an exclusively practical function: and that instead becomes, even to the eye, one of the vital centres of the area. It is a thermal power plant that says: there is also another kind of energy, no less important, and beauty is what spreads it.
Visitor Centre
Via Jervis and the surrounding area are home to the buildings that make up the UNESCO World Heritage property’s core zone. Located in the historic “Portineria del Pino”, the Visitor Centre welcomes tourists and visitors.
Former Carpentry Workshop
A building dedicated to craftsmanship that was transformed in the 1950s: since then, its adjustable sunshades have been reflected in the glass façades of the Officine ICO, in a play of reflections that brings movement to the street. Architecture, when you think about it, is precisely a long, constant and never-ending meditation on light.
Company Canteen
If the person who works is a person, and a person is body and spirit, then the lunch break cannot simply be a time for eating. Nor can the canteen be merely the place where this happens. And so here are these spaces open to nature, surprising spaces where one can unwind, rest, read, play, talk, remain silent. Productivity? It grows too.
The Church of San Bernardino
Once the home of the Olivetti family in the early 20th century, the church and convent house Giovanni Martino Spanzotti’s Life and Passion of Christ cycle, a remarkable Renaissance masterpiece and one of Piedmont’s most treasured artistic legacies. Its true protagonist is humanity itself: expressive faces, everyday people, humble settings, and a vision deeply rooted in Franciscan values.
Study Center
In a novel it is written that “Ivrea is a kind of beach where the future arrives in bottles”. Perhaps this is why the building where the new Olivetti products were designed, besides being a masterpiece of forms, was given the color of the sea?
Former Sertec
If Olivetti is a planet, Sertec is a satellite that was born in the late 1960s as an international engineering company. Its original headquarters has the courage of ideas: with the exposed concrete of the external vertical tower, the forms that play with the hillside, and the red colour of the interiors inspired by pop art.
Castellamonte District
Houses for workers, houses for employees, houses for managers in the same neighbourhood, rich in greenery and beauty. Here, Olivetti’s ideas travel back through history and whisper in our ear: “do you want a little social harmony? Do not divide the city by class, let their children play together. How? Start with the lawns.”
West Residential Unit "Talponia"
An architectural work that leaves you speechless. It reconciles opposites. It is a symbolic place of Ivrea, yet it speaks all the languages of the world. It develops underground, yet it is bright. It was born from the abstractions of its designers, yet it clings to nature with all its strength.
UCCD Houses
Olivetti’s Ivrea is also the archipelago of homes built by the Employee Housing Consultancy Office, led by the inexhaustible architect Emilio Aventino Tarpino. More roots or more imagination? As Ludovico Quaroni wrote, Olivetti’s intellectuals “are committed to building a modern tradition”.
Olivetti Office Building
The Office Building, entirely wrapped in nature and crossed by daylight, highly refined in the materials used, organised around its internal grand staircase, a masterpiece itself, is more than just a remarkable building: it is a verb stubbornly conjugated in the future tense.
New Olivetti Office Building
An Office Building already exists, and the new one cannot simply imitate it. And so, a distinguished architect, who is also a designer who has won four Compassi d’Oro, created an original building. Seen from below, it seems to move. And seen from above, it is said, its form resembles that of a comet.
