Olivetti

So German industry now resembles...

Remember Olivetti typewriters, electric typewriters back in the late '70s? Remember the Olivetti typewriters?

Yeah.

I mean, you're old enough to remember that.

They were beautiful electric typewriters.

But once the PC came out, it was obsolete, and there's no reduction in the wages of the pe- people that made Olivetti typewriters that could save Olivetti when the PC arrives.

So now we have electric vehicles that the Germans forgot to invest in, and that's it.

Kaput.

They turn commerce into culture and shopping into attention.

Today we are looking at one of those places, Negozio Olivetti in Venice, designed by Carlos Scarpa for Adriano Olivetti.

It was the showroom for typewriters and calculating machines, but it became something far greater, a lesson in how a commercial interior can carry dignity, intelligence and beauty.

In the late 1950s, Olivetti was not just an office machine company.

It was one of the clearest examples of a business using design as culture.

Everything belonged to a larger idea, that industry could be humane, modern, educated and responsible.

So when Olivetti opened a showroom in Piazza San Marco, the brief could not be ordinary.

Death was not a place for stacking machines in a window.

Italy in the 1950s was experiencing an economic miracle with factories churning out sleek new consumer appliances, and Sottsass was fascinated by mass manufacturing, but he worried that cold industrial efficiency was draining the soul out of daily living.

His big break came in 1958 when he was hired as a design consultant for the Italian manufacturer Olivetti.

For more than two decades, Sottsass helped transform Olivetti into a global design powerhouse.

His most famous creation from that was the Valentine Typewriter, released in 1969.

While most office machines from that era were dull beige or matte gray metal, Sottsass collaborated with the British designer Perry King to cast the Valentine in an eye-popping bright red plastic.

Oh, yeah.

Well, the first one that comes to mind, it's that Olivetti Grafica.

Oh, man.

Everybody wants

was going to say, it is weird because you were talking about this earlier.

Olivetti.

Yeah, they had loads of, like, the Italian, like, technology sector was, you know, obviously they had, like...

Four-point pens.

Hence making typewriters, which then end up becoming computers and WordPress processes almost by accident.

And though I actually think there's probably like a load of IBM machines and like phototype setting things and probably a couple of Macs.

But I imagine there would have been a heck of a lot of Olivetti machines that were in that warehouse that they suddenly opened up at the same time that they padlocked the one that all the guys were trying to type in.

Like that, whatever kind of, you know, much smaller... degree of machinery and specialists that you needed to imagine a lot of those were probably that kind of thing so that was um yeah i don't i don't know really what happened i think they've still got some specific it's probably one of those things where like fuji film or something like olivetti probably still exists but they probably make like relays for um electrical transformers in installations or something like that it's pretty it's pretty like some kind of thing like that I don't know.

You know, on St. Patrick's Day, I served not one drink in Manhattan.

Do they let you bring your Olivetti? Yeah, I have my note cards.

Okay, okay.

But wait,

And it also led to the eventual sort of birth of what I like to call corporate design, a corporate design ethos.

So, like, there was, in the early days, you had Olivetti, for example, right, in Italy, and they hired a whole bunch of designers who some of them had worked with Walter Gropius or had studied under Walter Gropius at Bauhaus, for example.

So you have these machines like the Olivetti Studio 42 of 1935 that was designed by Alexander Shevinsky.

And he was a former Bauhaus student.

And we're working, you know, this is, we're all within right now, the sort of streamlined era.

And they would eventually go on to create The, what would become, I think it would be Ettore Sottsass who would later be hired by Olivetti, who would basically design the ethos of the Olivetti brand.

And then Elia Noyes would come on in.

IBM, because he would go on to redesign the IBM Model 1, the Model A electric typewriter, and then eventually the Selectric.

And we should say Carlo Scarpa, because I've always...

He was born in Venice and a, a 20th-century architect who I always remember visiting his Olivetti shop in, just off St. Mark's Square in Venice.

He, he loved a, a material, a stone, a staircase, um, layers and levels.

Love.