Olivetti’s Ivrea: How an Italian Tech Giant Built the World’s Most Progressive Company Town
If you trace the path of the Dora Baltea River in early spring, when it swells with melting snow from the Matterhorn, you will quietly arrive at what first appears to be any other small Italian town. Yet in the 1950s, Ivrea was the site of an unheralded experiment in living and working.
The Olivetti Company, founded in 1908 by Camillo Olivetti, was now run by his ambitious Son Adriano, and looked a lot like Apple Inc does today — it was at the forefront of technology, blending design and functionality in ways that had never been seen before, reshaping the office landscape around the globe. This was in no small part because of Adriano Olivetti, who was not a conventional businessman. He was political and had strong inclinations toward humanism. He was a self-taught student of city planning, and he read extensively the architectural and urbanist literature of the day. He hired famous designers to work on his products, making some of them, such as the 1949 Lettera 22 typewriter and the 1958 Elea 9003 mainframe computer, into icons of design.
As Italy began to build out of the war, Adriano’s passion for design transformed into a comprehensive corporate philosophy. This vision aimed to enhance every aspect of company life, from the design of a space bar, the colour schemes in advertising, and the living standards of its employees. Ivrea was the bold manifestation of this.
