Adriano Olivetti’s Vision to Merge Design and Economy: Design Consultants vis-à-vis Reproducibility as a ‘Concrete Utopia’

Abstract

As it was shown in the exhibition “Olivetti, design in industry”, held in 1952 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Italian Industrialist Adriano Olivetti was aware of the importance of design for the success of his company. For this reason, he hired designers such as Ettore Sottsass Jr., Giò Ponti, Achille Castiglioni, Vico Magistretti, Marco Zanuso, Joe Colombo, and Mario Bellini among others. This paper will be focused on the analysis of the impact that these designers had on the success of Olivetti’s company. Special attention will be paid to Elea 9003 (1957-1959) and its cabinets, designed by Sottsass, ETP 55 Portable Typewriter (1985-1986), designed by Mario Bellini, which constitutes a case in which a quality and design approach was employed in order to counter excessive price competition, and Sistema 45 (1973), a collection of incorporated machines and support systems also designed by Sottsass, including an early minicomputer. Central for this paper is the analysis of the design of Elea 9003, the first computer produced by Olivetti for the design of which Sottsass was awarded his first Compasso d’Oro in 1959. Sottsass’s role in Adriano Olivetti’s company will also be scrutinized. Sottsass served as a design consultant in Olivetti’s company from 1958 to 1980 and designed a notable series of office machines and electronic equipment. Special attention will be paid to the role of design for the success of Valentine typewriter (1969), designed by Sottsass and Briton Perry King, which is probably the most famous of Olivetti’s typewriters and is an example of what the Italian sociologist and philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato defined as an ‘ideological product’. Of major importance for understanding how the transformations of the relationship between design and bureaucracy provokes new modes of production of knowledge is Lazzarato’s claim, in “Immaterial Labour”, that “[i]deological products produce […] new stratifications of reality [in the sense that] they are the intersection where human power, knowledge, and action meet [and that] [n]ew modes of seeing and knowing demand new technologies, and new technologies demand new forms of seeing and knowing”. My presentation will shed light of the relationship between cost of design, design quality and commercial success in the case of Sistema 45 (1973), also designed by Sottsass. Sistema 45 was a collection of incorporated machines and support systems, including an early minicomputer. Sottsass started working on Sistema 45 in the late 1960s. Its design was based on a broad research he conducted on the history of office spaces, but also on statistical and ergonomic information. Sottsass designed a booklet entitled Uffici in order to bring together and communicate the outcome of the research he conducted for this project (fig. 3). The premise was to reduce visual impact and eschew luxury in what would be a deliberately democratic and modular system. Sistema 45 had been designed as a workaday series and its design was focused on keeping the costs down and on the problems of reproducibility. An aspect that is central for this paper is the parallel involvement of Sottsass in the promotion of Italian design, mainly through his collaboration with Adriano Olivetti, and his intention “not to achieve a product but to state and provoke ideas”, to borrow his own words from the catalogue of the exhibition “Italy: The New Domestic Landscape”, curated by Emilio Ambasz and held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1972. The objective of the paper is to show how Olivetti’s vision to reinvent the relationship between design and economy was encapsulated in the construction of a building as a “Learning and Experimental Centre”, built in early 1950s, physically distinct from the Olivetti company site. My presentation will also present how the transformation of Ivrea into a major hub of Italian manufacturing, which attracted engineers, designers and factory workers from across Italy, constitutes a case where Olivetti’s ‘concrete utopia’ took a spatial form. As Franco Ferrarotti underscores, Olivetti’s utopian vision could be characterised as “concrete utopia” in the sense that his understanding of communities as concrete goes hand in hand with his conviction that communities are determined by geography and history.