WHEN MITHS FALL. Olivetti corporate architecture and its lost identity

The research sought to investigate the Olivetti typewriter company’s generalized loss of identity in the Canavese region, starting from the analysis of the processes that led to the progressive abandonment of the corporate’s architectural heritage in the second half of 20th century. Under the presidency of Adriano Olivetti (1938-1960), after the second World War the company entered the electronics’ field. Aware of the Italian technological backwardness, the corporate looked at the most technologically developed countries. The role of USA soon became crucial: here Olivetti founded the very first research centre in 1952, followed similar pioneering experiences in Italy where the commitment of Le Corbusier for an electronical centre (1960-1965) marked the apex of this season. The failure of this project reflected the economic and management-level crises that followed the sudden death of Adriano in 1960 and that caused a global corporate’s reorganization. After the first reluctance of the BofD, new investments were settled for electronics, and triggered the most demanding architectural program in the whole company's history both in Italy and abroad. In the Canavese region – Olivetti’s birthplace that the research aims to investigate – the project of a cultural, political, and economic community – the Comunità started by Adriano in the 1930s – led to a wide improvement of the constellation of buildings dedicated to electronic research, training and production, often followed by facilities. Nowadays, mostly none of those architectures recalls the name Olivetti. Hardly anything has been said about their dismission, partial or complete destruction that led to an identity’s collapse in the 1990s. This process seems to be even more impactful in those places where the company had its strongest influence, where its buildings – and its legacy – lie as in an elephants’ cemetery. Among them, the industrial hub of Scarmagno (1962-1988) assumes a crucial importance in this research. Placed in the heart of Canavese, plants, warehouses, offices, training centres, library, infirmary, and other facilities of this new complex were entrusted to internationally known Italian architects, as Eduardo Vittoria and Marco Zanuso. The architects conceived an activities’ container that conveyed space quality, modularity, prefabrication, technological innovation. Given the chronology and the complexity of its transformations, Scarmagno hub is taken as a paradigmatic example of this phenomenon of oblivion, increased by the recent debate on re-functionalization. By comparing the documental heritage at Associazione Archivio Storico Olivetti (Ivrea, Italy) with the corporate house organs, the recent bibliography on Olivetti corporate history, and local and national newspapers, the study aims at highlighting the gap in the traditional Olivetti tale told by the architectures left after the myth’s fall.