Take an Olivetti to Florence

We thought we knew everything there was to know about Olivetti by now: the ‘Apple of Ivrea’, its innovative design, its showrooms around the world and its factories designed by leading architects. And yet, we are still discovering new aspects to it. A book recounts the remarkable story of the construction of the company’s headquarters in Florence.

It is the late 1960s; Olivetti is one of the world’s most cutting-edge brands, the equivalent of today’s Big Tech; in Florence, following the flood of ’66, a new headquarters was needed to house offices and a showroom. Aware that he was dealing with a historical and architectural context unique in the world, Roberto Olivetti demanded a modern, cutting-edge building capable of blending into the urban fabric, and so he entrusted the project to Alberto Galardi.

The story is now described in detail in the book Olivetti Firenze 1968–1972 by Giuseppe Galbiati, Franz Graf and Giulia Marino (Edizioni di Comunità). The book reconstructs the design process, in which the commission was awarded directly to Galardi by Olivetti, who knew the architect well, having married his cousin, Maria Luisa Lizier; It was only later that he was joined by the engineer Silvano Zorzi, a leading expert in prestressed reinforced concrete. The building resulting from this collaboration is extraordinary: on the basement level, a mechanised car park; above that, a shop with glass walls that disappear into the floor; and the whole structure topped by a four-storey office block ‘suspended’ from the roof. Indeed, the most remarkable feature was the structure: a bold ‘bridge’ supported by two towers, from which prestressed reinforced concrete stay cables ‘descend’, to which the building’s storeys are anchored.

The book documents the building with an extensive collection of images, enriched by over 200 photographs from the photo-essays of Gabriele Basilico, Gianni Barengo Gardin, Pino Abbrescia and Roberto Conte.

It is also fascinating to see the many archive images documenting the Olivetti building in full swing; indeed, as if the architecture were not enough, these offices also represent a key milestone in the history of Italian design. It was, in fact, specifically for this building that Ettore Sottsass designed the first prototype of the Synthesis 45 Series, the now legendary line of office furniture produced by Olivetti, which Sottsass had reimagined here to ‘respond to change through an inclusive system of furniture’. The Synthesis 45 was, in fact, modular and customisable according to the tasks carried out by the employees, thereby making modern open-plan offices less monotonous: those boundless, wall-less offices that were then extremely widespread and characterised by alienating expanses of equidistant desks – perfect for a scene from Backrooms.

In short, Olivetti Firenze 1968–1972 reconstructs the historical story of a building that is anything but insignificant – not only for post-war Italian architecture, but for the whole ‘Made in Italy’ movement which, at the time, was admired by the world and which today is merely a lacklustre ministerial label.