Olivetti

Olivetti was not just a company making typewriters and computers. For half a century it was the most complete example of how design can embrace everything: products, advertising, shops, factories, even housing and services for employees. It is the model par excellence of what we now call corporate identity.

Camillo and Adriano

The company was founded in 1908 in Ivrea, Piedmont, by the engineer Camillo Olivetti, and in 1911 it presented the M1, the first Italian typewriter. In 1932 the management passed to his son Adriano Olivetti, an entrepreneur and intellectual who believed that a factory should also serve the growth of people and the community. Under his leadership Olivetti brought in architects, artists, graphic designers and writers: the new Ivrea factory was designed by the Rationalist architects Figini and Pollini, and the Studio 42 portable (1935) was the joint work of engineers, a painter and architects.

Nizzoli, Pintori and the Lettera 22

From 1938 the designer Marcello Nizzoli created the most famous products: the Lexikon 80 office typewriter and the Divisumma 14 calculator (1948), and above all the Lettera 22 portable (1950), light and elegant, which entered the collection of MoMA in New York with the Lexikon in 1952. In 1959 a jury of designers convened by the Illinois Institute of Technology chose it as the best design product of the previous hundred years. Its advertising graphics, entrusted for thirty years to Giovanni Pintori, became famous worldwide, and Olivetti's shops, like the one designed by Carlo Scarpa in Piazza San Marco in Venice, are small architectural masterpieces.

From mainframes to the personal computer

Olivetti was also a pioneer of electronics. In 1959 a group of researchers led by Mario Tchou built the Elea 9003, one of the first fully transistorised computers, designed by Ettore Sottsass. In 1965 came the Programma 101 by Pier Giorgio Perotto, considered the world's first programmable desktop computer. Sottsass then designed the Valentine portable typewriter (1969), in bright red plastic, a Pop object meant to be used anywhere except in the office. From the 1970s the products were designed by Mario Bellini, whose work includes the ET 101 (1978), one of the first electronic typewriters, and later by Michele De Lucchi.

The legacy

After Adriano's death in 1960 the company went through difficult decades. In the 1980s it made personal computers such as the M24, then moved into telecommunications and in 1999 took control of Telecom Italia; today the Olivetti brand belongs to the TIM group. Since 2018 “Ivrea, industrial city of the 20th century”, with the factories, offices and housing built by Olivetti, has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Sources

• Wikipedia – Olivetti (it)
• Wikipedia – Olivetti (en)
• Wikipedia – Ivrea, città industriale del XX secolo (it)
• Wikipedia – Olivetti M1 (it)