The Olivetti of Zanuso among project, process, and product

Abstract

During the years of post-war reconstruction in Italy, the project represented an instrument of revenge on the ruins inherited from the war and industry seemed to be the answer to the needs of a society that was rebuilding itself. The bond between project and industry thus spreads to all sectors of artistic production and the common thread is the use of words borrowed from the world of industry, thus raising the phenomenon of industrialisation. Olivetti’s experience is placed in this scenario, characterised by his interest beyond the factory, aimed at architectural, urban planning, cultural, publishing, and political issues. The Olivetti ideal focuses on aspects ranging from the typewriter to the city. The best architects work for Olivetti, and among them is Marco Zanuso. The factory is the topos of the project, in which theories of building industrialisation are synthesised. Zanuso experiments with the material’s potential to address issues related to the factory; in the reinforced concrete, he discovers the possibility of rationalising the composition process. Thus, the structure finds the perfect balance between technique and expressive language, generating space, light, form, and function. The beam-pillar system, an ideal synthesis of the architecture for Olivetti in Argentina and Brazil, discloses the capacity to conceive space as a single entity, in which the recognisability of the construction system becomes the identifying key of the factory itself.