The company as a total project

The theme chosen for Fuorisalone 2026 — Be the Project — invites reflection on the design process as a practice of awareness, capable of shaping not only objects, but also relationships, the spaces around us, social needs, and ways of living. From this perspective, the history of Olivetti remains one of the most radical experiences of the twentieth century: a company that embodied design as method, culture, and responsibility. Between the late 1940s and 1960, Adriano Olivetti did not simply “do” design: he was design. As Giancarlo Lunati writes in Adriano Olivetti. Culture as a Project, “his company was a form of civilization, an attempt to harmonize technology and humanism.”

The Olivetti model was a living organism in which everything was conceived as part of a whole: architecture, products, communication, workplaces, social services. Nothing was decorative or secondary, because everything contributed to a broader vision in which aesthetics and ethics coincided. Marco Sammicheli, in Adriano Olivetti and Design as Political Action, summarizes this tension: “For Olivetti, design is not an object, but a method of relationship. A political and cultural act that places the person at the center.” Architecture also reflected this vision. Factories designed by Figini and Pollini, Cosenza, Valle, and Gardella opened industrial spaces to light and landscape, anticipating what we would now call sustainability: respect for territory, labor, and people’s time. As Giorgio Bigatti notes, “Olivetti’s architecture consists of moral buildings as well as functional ones.”
 

© Olivetti_Ronzanieditore

Olivetti design was the visible face of this philosophy. Nizzoli’s typewriters, Bellini’s calculators, and Sottsass’s Valentine were more than products: they were ideas of the world. Objects that combined technology and grace, precision and humanity, educating users in taste and beauty. Paola Antonelli has described Olivetti as “the first company to align design with democracy,” meaning that these objects aimed to make design a universal language, accessible to all. Olivetti was also a multidisciplinary laboratory ahead of its time. Engineers, architects, poets, graphic designers, philosophers, and sociologists worked side by side; magazines, libraries, and training programs nurtured a shared culture. As Stefano Boeri recalls in Olivetti. Forms and Values, it was “the first multidisciplinary laboratory of modernity.” The dream of the Ivrea Community embodied this ambition: harmonizing business and social justice, work and culture, technology and beauty. In an era dominated by serial labor, Olivetti cultivated belonging, responsibility, and participation, shaping not only professionals but citizens.

In a present driven by speed and technological simplification, the Olivetti lesson remains strikingly relevant. It reminds us that design is never just form or function, but meaning: every product carries a worldview. And that innovation cannot exist without thinking that connects progress with human well-being. “I dream of a factory in which human beings are at the center, and machines are a means of their liberation,” wrote Adriano Olivetti — a sentence that encapsulates his entire vision and still speaks to us today. Because design is totality: business, architecture, design, communication, landscape, ethics. Olivetti remains the most powerful example of how a company can embody an idea of the world, a declaration of love for the potential of design. Perhaps today, more than ever, returning to Ivrea — not as a place, but as a concept — means rediscovering that human and poetic dimension of making that allows us, once again, to Be the Project.