Between Stirling and Olivetti: Ted Cullinan’s Workplaces Design in the UK

Ted Cullinan’s (1931–2019) work for Olivetti is complex and fascinating: his mixed-function buildings in Belfast, Dundee, Carlisle and Derby are unique and astonishing artefacts, also if almost unknown to the broader architecture audience. The purpose of this article is to reassemble the phases of this brief but extremely incisive collaboration between Cullinan, James Stirling and the Italian company. From his first Olivetti project, shared with “Big Jim” Stirling in Haslemere—a refurbishment of an Edwardian pre-existence converted into a residence for students and technicians—to the design for Dundee, Carlisle, Belfast and Derby, the impact of Cullinan’s pre-sustainable ideas is palpable. We find these ideas in the elegance of the relationship between building and landscape, in the social agenda, but also in the representativeness of the iconic roofs and in the materials. His work exhibits an architectural versatility that has allowed the buildings to keep intact their essential characteristics, despite their subsequent destinies. Re-reading Cullinan in relation to Olivetti’s buildings, therefore, is two-fold: on the one hand, to reconsider the English architect among the ‘creators’ of the Olivetti image, and on the other to underline how Cullinan was a fundamental interpreter of the ideas of unity, between architecture and industrial design, in a unique phase of the British technological history of the 1970s.