Castellamonte District
Homes for workers, homes for office employees, homes for managers, all within the same neighbourhood, rich in greenery and beauty. Here, Olivetti’s ideas reach back through history and speak quietly in our ear: “Would you like a little more social harmony? Then don’t divide the city by social class. Let their children play together. How? Start with the green spaces.”
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 ICO Workshops, creating a play of reflections that brings the street to life. Architecture, after all, is a long, unending, and never truly finished meditation on light.
West Residential Unit “Talponia”
An architectural work that never fails to amaze. It embraces seeming contradictions: it is one of Ivrea’s defining landmarks, yet it speaks a universal language. Built largely underground, it is filled with light. Born from the bold imagination of its designers, it remains deeply rooted in the surrounding landscape.
Olivetti Neighbourhoods
In Ivrea, urban planners and architects guided the transition from rural life to the industrial age. As Richard Neutra wrote: “Can we really have two kinds of design: one, devoted to beauty, for our leisure hours; the other, vast in scale and coarse in character, intended solely for practical utility?”
UCCD Olivetti Houses
Olivetti’s Ivrea is also an archipelago of homes built by the Employee Housing Consultancy Office, led by the visionary architect Emilio Aventino Tarpino. More tradition or more imagination? As Ludovico Quaroni wrote, the Olivetti intellectuals were “committed to building a modern tradition.”
A Journey Through Olivetti
Summarizing the history of a company like Olivetti in just a few words is almost impossible. Here, we offer only a brief timeline, spanning from its origins to the death of Adriano Olivetti, the period during which the company was, in essence, entrusted with an unprecedented role.
Camillo Olivetti
Samuel David Camillo Olivetti, born in Ivrea in 1868, founded Italy’s first typewriter factory and carried his family name across the oceans. An innovator, a pioneer, and a man who effortlessly reconciled two identities often seen as contradictory: that of an industrial entrepreneur and that of a committed socialist.
Olivetti Crèche
Among the wide range of services the company created for its employees and their children, the Olivetti Crèche stands out. The greatest ideas often seem simple once they have been expressed. Like this one: to build a community centred on people, you must first create places designed with children in mind. Places where they can grow, dream, and let their imagination flourish.
Red-Brick Factory
At the end of the nineteenth century, a young engineer named Camillo envisioned a factory in a meadow. He saw it in the sense that he imagined it. Then he built it, setting in motion, without ever foreseeing it, the most original industrial story of the century about to begin. Every flight begins with a nest. This one is made of red bricks.
Social Services Center
“The person who spends long days in the factory does not leave their humanity behind in their work overalls.” We are not defined solely by what we do, so believed Adriano Olivetti. That is why, among hexagonal columns, light wells, carefully selected plants, and colorful walls, this place dedicated to the care of workers resembles a temple.
ICO Workshops
“In broad daylight,” we say of something that has nothing to hide. Just like the work carried out in these transparent workshops, with their glass walls, known throughout the world. They were born from the guiding conviction of the young industrialist Adriano Olivetti: “the factory for man, not man for the factory.” And the message is greater than the monument.
Adriano Olivetti
There are people who share a special relationship with the horizon, as though they possess an innate need to look beyond, across both space and time. Adriano Olivetti was one of them, not least in the way he understood his role as an industrialist, urban planner, publisher, and politician throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. The back cover of one of his biographies poses the question: “Can one be both an entrepreneur and a revolutionary?” His life answers with a resounding yes.