Writings and speeches

The work aims to introduce the French public to the figure of Adriano Olivetti, an intellectual entrepreneur who, through his typewriter factory, worked for a renewal of Italian society and culture after the World War II. Architecture – factories, social services, collective activities – design – typewriters or calculators – art – artists, writers, graphic designers that Olivetti involved in his projects – are the elements that contribute to improving the life of the factory and the community, in bringing quality, beauty, dignity. Olivetti's activities have been shining since Ivrea, a town close to the French border and which has recently been inscribed by UNESCO on the World Heritage List as an example of " industrial city of the 20th century”. The texts were composed by Olivetti on special occasions, including Some were later collected by Olivetti himself in an anthology in 1960 and recently reissued by Edizioni di Comunità, the publishing house he had founded in 1946. Olivetti's thinking, which the selected texts illustrate, is still today at the center of debates in Italy and in other countries, in because of the originality of its objectives and the breadth of its aims, which aim to bring together all aspects of human life. This book is a collection of Adriano's writings and speeches. Olivetti, organized into three different sections: the factory and the community, the work and its purposes, architecture and urban planning. In order to provide a framework historical and to illustrate the relevance of Olivetti's thinking, the texts are preceded by an introduction by a historian and architectural critic, Fabio Gallanti, director of the Arc en Rêve museum in Bordeaux, which presents the thought and Olivetti's activity, illustrating it in its historical and cultural context and proposing its most original and current aspects. An afterword by president of the Edizioni di Comunità, Beniamino de' Liguori Carino, illustrates the project to keep alive and disseminate the cultural heritage that Adriano Olivetti built.