Interview with Pietro Cesari

Pietro Cesari: Well, the story is quite complex. But I think the main reasons that architecture, urban design and product design played such an important role at Olivetti were social and humanistic ones and are closely tied to Adriano Olivetti who was the managing director from the 1930s until his death in 1960. He focused very much on trying to create a company, which was aware of its social impact. So, before you look at the products, office buildings and factories of Olivetti, you need to understand the motivation and approach of Adriano Olivetti. He believed in the capacity of industrialisation to change society. For him architecture and urban planning were some kind of instruments for achieving these social goals.
          Furthermore, the approach to product design was more connected to a humanistic vision. The main question, I would say, was the meaning of industrial culture in everyday life. So, if you dig deeper into the company’s business practice and decision making you will find careful considerations about the societal impact of their products. Just an example: Olivetti was one of a few companies in Italy – and probably in Europe – that hired intellectuals, writers, people working in the cultural sector, as managers for the company. It is something that probably today is hard to find and that was even at that time not so common.

To Adriano Olivetti the enterprise embodied the true transforming factor of society, driven by scientific mechanisms and rational logic.

Franziska: Does that mean, that architecture and design were a way to express this humanistic and social vision or did the leadership figures and their teams view it as a practise to reach that vision?

Sabeth Wiese: So, it was also a lot about the person Adriano Olivetti and his vision, which responded to the historical context of this time?

Franziska: That’s interesting, because what remains of Olivetti in the public consciousness at least in Germany – if anything – are the products. So, it’s interesting to learn now that there’s so much more behind the products, which probably helped Olivetti even more to become the iconic company they were.

So, the work of Olivetti was political, was editorial, there were many magazines about cultural topics, even concerning architecture and urban planning.

Pietro: I find this also fascinating in another perspective: there is this big entity, the modern business enterprise of a really big size, which in order to run its business efficiently needs to synchronize its parts, to keep some kind of unity to its actions. That means, it has to develop a methodology, to set up a standardized process, to configure a plan. But on the other hand, especially when it comes to Olivetti, you see this openness or let’s say capacity of being creative and innovative, without falling into a bureaucratic approach. In the 1950s Olivetti was trying to foster and facilitate this kind of process both for product design and public design. A big corporation is a complicated organisation, where the different parts follow integrated procedures. In Olivetti, a specific and general design method - we can say an organic method - was tested. A fundamental aspect of this method was the company organisation. So basically, the process became the project.

Sabeth: Do you have an example for this?

Pietro: Yes, of course! There were many architects engaged in different projects. But few of them were integrated within the enterprise, much more they were working constantly as external collaborators. The idea was that architects or the designers would connect the enterprise with the outside world, by bringing a constant up-to-date vision of the disciplines (think of Sottsass, De Lucchi, and the Memphis group). Designers were not obliged to strictly follow a corporate set policy or pre-imposed identity. Design ideas were pursued as open processes. Technicians and designers had to face constant moments of confrontation and choice. The end result depends on how the process was managed, how it was organised. Inputs like consumer research, economic and technical feasibility, and other factors, all were part of the decision-making process. And all this information had to be very well controlled and coordinated between the parts. The architects and designers had to be able to translate this information. Especially in the Olivetti case, they had to be aware of what was the social vision.
           I think this was a very special situation at Olivetti. Ettore Sottsass for example shaped product and industrial design for Olivetti, but on the other hand he was also engaged in the Memphis group. And Olivetti’s approach is, I would say, opposite to the one of Memphis. Nevertheless, this was not a contradiction. Even more, in one of Olivetti’s exhibitions on office furniture some chairs of Memphis were exhibited. There was no problem in this. I think it was very much the idea of Olivetti – not to impose something – but to be part of the discussion, which is something different. Besides, Olivetti was behind various publishing projects with very broad cultural approaches.
          If you look at today’s cultural and product policies of the big tech corporations, it is difficult to find an approach of discussion. Rather you’ll see one of imposition.

Carl Friedrich Then: Well, sometimes you get the feeling that those big corporations just try to keep up with themselves rather than doing something out of the box.

Pietro: (laughs) Exactly! But perhaps this is also due to the fact that they have less competition – or more dominance – in their sector than Olivetti had.

Sabeth: I am afraid companies are nowadays more interested in making a statement and stand out by making that statement instead of being part of a discussion. Because the discussion is always a kind of question, which also means uncertainty which also means uncertainty and this is too fragile for companies, I guess.

Pietro: I agree. But maybe today’s situations are different from then. If we look into the making of designed products, there is a whole new kind of regulating mechanism, that we cannot find before. Today’s corporations have access to enormous quantity of data. They can elaborate numbers about taste, work on algorithms to collect information they need... or directly influence us with that! Moreover, standards on the production of products have multiplied. it is a completely new setting. But in general, I would say that the tools that corporations use today prevent us from having a discussion that is not predetermined.

Franziska: That neatly ties into another question we prepared for the interview, also regarding the changes over time. We were wondering if the importance of design and corporate architecture to shape the image of a company has increased significantly since then? Put differently: Where do you see the difference between Olivetti’s past and today’s corporations like Facebook and Apple?

Pietro: Do you mean a specific corporate image in the sense of a corporate identity?

But in general, I would say that the tools that corporations use today prevent us from having a discussion that is not predetermined.

Sabeth: My point in our discussion was, that the representation in the public is quite important since a very long time. I am not sure whether you know about the Fagus-Werk here in Germany, which is a symbol of the 1920s? And even before that, factory buildings had a lot of ornaments and decorations, sometimes even neo-baroque. When the industry changed to a service industry, also the buildings changed. The factories became less important, so when we think about companies nowadays, only the headquarter comes to mind. So that is maybe why we think the architecture of headquarters as a representation for the corporate image is now much more important, than it was in history. But I’m not sure if I made the question any clearer… (everybody laughs)

Pietro: Oh well. I think the discussion might then be “What changed?”. What changed is also the employee world. I mean it’s difficult to compare a corporation from the 1960s with today’s corporations! In the 1950s the industry was still kind of materialistic and in presence, with workers and factories. Workers were classified (I am simplifying) in specialized and not. Within it, especially in a company like Olivetti, of precision mechanical engineering and after electronic and informatic, the working-class changed very fast. Automation appeared in the factory but also in the offices. There were visible changes in the corporate social structure, and these were investigated scientifically. Industrial sociologists at Olivetti were engaged to understand and track this mutation of the workers demographics. But they were also looking at the influences that these changes had in the outside world. Anyway, the changes in the social structure of corporations in the 1960s lead to an increase of clerks or basically white collar jobs in Italy. The HQs are generally speaking the symbol of the growth in number of employees. Such buildings became symbols of identity, generally defined, since the moment when commercial, identification and international dimension plays a major part in the business itself.
          If we want to keep a comparison on this aspect with the tech industry of today, we can only register a huge social difference. IT engineering employees and their creative staff are very different people. They work in places like the new headquarters where it is very difficult to trace the limit between what is working and what is private space. These corporations must attract mostly young talents from all over the world with specific knowledge, and their main buildings are potent weapons of attraction. Both the building and the benefits these corporations offer keep the worker within their area of influence and control. The discussions taken place in Olivetti during the 1950s was, on the contrary, to find a solution in order to keep separate work and leisure and preserve the integrity of the individual.
This was a discussion concerning especially the urban field.
          Factories of today – they still exist, we are still living in a society whose needs are met by the industry – has different kind of workers, when they are not completely robotic. In the 1950s the average worker was someone who had barely any knowledge. At the assembly line no creativity was required. So, you cannot compare it to the creative talents of today. That is to say, the structure of society changed. I am not able to suggest how people needs changed so far. The ideal of freedom, for example is a very specific topic. Olivetti in the 1950s and 1960s was really thinking of how their workers can live properly, how their family can do too, and so their community. That was a big discussion within a private body about public life. I do not know to what extent this kind of debate takes place within corporations today. There are surely some corporate responsibility ideals at Apple, for example. There are sustainable and social inclusion ideals. But I do not really know, or I have not really grasped what their social vision is… What is their idea of a real, concrete, constructed society, beyond rhetoric.

Pietro: But to be honest, one probably must have a broad knowledge of different cases and a proper approach to analyse sensitive factors. I don't have this broad knowledge. The history of enterprises is rather young and in many respects has been little investigated. So, I do not know how appropriate it is to make such comparison, because society really changed in the last 70 years and so did corporations. Anyway, I firmly think that the diachronic analysis of the topic, especially in architecture and design, deserves more attention.

So, the design did not happen afterwards, but was part of the process from the beginning.

Pietro: I see, but I am not so confident it was like that. (everybody laughs)

OK, I mean of course, they were trusted by the directors. They were hired to participate in designing the products. Many times they had excellent ideas on how to design a product, to find certain solutions and participate in shaping a machine or a buildings. But there were of course limits to their creativity. Products must work, and their production had to be reasonable for the business. Also, sometimes certain ideas or solutions did not come from the designers. For example, the Valentine typewriter instead of presenting a leather or tissue box is placed in a plastic one. The idea was not from Ettore Sottsass or of one of the members of the design team. The idea came from the head of the commercial department, Ugo Galassi. So, the designers definitively had not the freedom to do anything they liked. Design was teamwork.

Franziska: But they were sitting at the table from the beginning, right? Because still nowadays it often feels like designers can take care of certain things but are not really involved in the process from the beginning. And at Olivetti it seems like they were much more invited into the whole process and the discussion – be it architecture or product design.

Pietro: They were part of the process, for sure. So, when the commercial department after market analysis suggested to develop a project, the engineers started to make prototypes together with the designers. Therefore, the people who did work on the technical part worked closely together with the designers. So, the design did not happen afterwards, but was part of the process from the beginning. Also, they worked together with the marketing department and the management on what the image of the company and its products should be. In a way there was always an exchange between the different branches and the designers. In this sense you might call it design-centric. But for me it is clear that it was a collective work. And probably most design-related work is so anyways.

Ettore Sottsass for example shaped product and industrial design for Olivetti, but on the other hand he was also engaged in the Memphis group.

Carl: That’s funny, because at the form design magazine they did the same in the 1950s. For our blog we thought about such a multi-language approach, too.

Carl: Unfortunately, I think we should come to an end at this point. So as a last question: Would you say there are some learnings from the history of Olivetti?

The Olivetti case in Italy is also an outcome of the industrial society of the 20th century, but a mature and enlarged discussion in society took place only in the second part of the century, with the rising of the big business culture.

Pietro: I think that the Olivetti case can reveal design approaches that can maybe still be valid today. We are living in a world which is even more surrounded by industrial made objects and above all by uncertainty. Big corporations are entities with a huge social impact.
          If we accept that the process as a project is a way to deal with uncertainty, and also a way to include social discussion, to imagine today’s corporations engaging in it would mean to see companies in different positions of social responsibilities. So, at Olivetti you could maybe find some inspiration for that process, if you look at what they tried to do in the 1950s and -60s. And furthermore of course there is the opportunity to understand design in a much broader sense than just as marketing, shaping of products or designing images.

Franziska: I like it.

Pietro: That doesn’t surprise me. Rarely this broader history of Olivetti is known in other countries than Italy, and today Olivetti is mostly used as an example for good design.

Carl: … I guess that is how we perceived Olivetti as well …

Pietro: I also participated in a conference, where one professor presented how corporations shape their image. Olivetti was one of the examples. But it was a kind of oversimplification. Olivetti was really entangled with the cultural situation after the second world war in Italy. Behind the "identity project" was a discussion on the educational and influential role of industry in society, the corporation and the balance of power. A discourse that follows like a “filrouge” the highest debates of modernity between the wars in Germany. And I think, also in Germany there are really interesting enterprises which one can analyse in this regard.

Carl: For sure. But it is also interesting to see, that the histories of two countries, which are really close to each other is sometimes so unfamiliar. Especially in Italy there were also a lot of conflicts within the society after the Second World War until the 1990s.

Pietro: Absolutely, there are differences but also similarities. There is a German expression on the relationship between Germany and Italy: “die fernen Nachbarn”, the "distant neighbours”. Not geographical proximity but relationships and affinities unite them in history, with symmetries and asymmetries. For example, going beyond the parallels of the Nazi / Fascist regimes, after the Second World War like Germany with Konrad Adenauer, also Italy was ruled for a long time by a Christian party. A new democratic society was re-established with the impetus of the economic “Boom” (or Wirtschaftswunder in Germany): symmetry then. But the outcomes of those periods differed between countries, and the asymmetries are easily recognisable. Perhaps urban space and the built environment offers itself as one of the best areas of investigation in which to test a comparison of approaches and results. In Italy outcomes were, generally speaking, disastrous. Italian urban history is studded with great missed opportunities. Especially if they are compared with debates and ideas that were circulating through the elites, intellectuals, architects or urban designers.
          If we also look at the industrial history of the two countries, we will find significant differences. In the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century Germany experienced an accelerated industrial development, especially through the heavy industries and their exploitation of raw materials (coal and iron). Then also through major technological breakthroughs: think about the role of Siemens or AEG with electricity for the development of cities and other industrial sectors. Italy, on the other hand, did not experience such developments at the beginning of the 20th century but only later after the Second World War. The Werkbund and the Bauhaus, arise from these accelerated upheavals in the German society, and from an intellectual debate at the highest level among the leading figures of culture, design, industry and politics. The Olivetti case in Italy is also an outcome of the industrial society of the 20th century, but a mature and enlarged discussion in society took place only in the second part of the century, with the rising of the big business culture.
          To conclude, more comparative research should definitively be encouraged.

Sabeth: Thanks!

GESTALT ERROR 409

Interview mit Pietro Cesari

Maybe you heard of Olivetti before. And maybe some of Olivetti’s products will come to your mind like their iconic red typewriter Valentine from 1969. And if you are a little bit more engaged with the history of design you might even know that designers like Ettore Sottsass and Michele De Lucchi played an important role within Olivetti’s fortunes.
          Following those impressive names we decided to dig a little deeper and talk to someone who knows more about this iconic Italian brand. So, we met with → Pietro Cesari an architect turned researcher and expert of Olivetti. He was involved with two fascinating documentaries on Olivetti and is working right now on a PhD about Olivetti within the → Architectures of Order research cluster in Frankfurt/Main. But as we spoke to Pietro, we learned that behind the beautiful products and impressive names there was much more to learn about Olivetti and why the company chose to collaborate so deeply with designers, architects and even philosophers and writers.

Pietro Cesari: Well, the story is quite complex. But I think the main reasons that architecture, urban design and product design played such an important role at Olivetti were social and humanistic ones and are closely tied to Adriano Olivetti who was the managing director from the 1930s until his death in 1960. He focused very much on trying to create a company, which was aware of its social impact. So, before you look at the products, office buildings and factories of Olivetti, you need to understand the motivation and approach of Adriano Olivetti. He believed in the capacity of industrialisation to change society. For him architecture and urban planning were some kind of instruments for achieving these social goals.
          Furthermore, the approach to product design was more connected to a humanistic vision. The main question, I would say, was the meaning of industrial culture in everyday life. So, if you dig deeper into the company’s business practice and decision making you will find careful considerations about the societal impact of their products. Just an example: Olivetti was one of a few companies in Italy – and probably in Europe – that hired intellectuals, writers, people working in the cultural sector, as managers for the company. It is something that probably today is hard to find and that was even at that time not so common.

To Adriano Olivetti the enterprise embodied the true transforming factor of society, driven by scientific mechanisms and rational logic.

Franziska: Does that mean, that architecture and design were a way to express this humanistic and social vision or did the leadership figures and their teams view it as a practise to reach that vision?

Pietro: I think it was a practise, an instrument. You need to understand the historical context. In the 1950s, so right after the Second World War, the ruins of European cities raised the question of how to build a new society. Italy just experienced the end of twenty years of a brutal fascist regime, and the general aim was to base a foundation for a democratic society. Adriano Olivetti was aware of this. He was already an established industrialist. We could say that he was an entrepreneur who kept himself updated on the modernisation of the factory, on mass industry, on its techniques, aware of its improvements but also of its destructive and disruptive influences on the individual and its social life. During the war, he had to take refuge in Switzerland. There he wrote his major essay on the political order of the community titled L’Ordine politico delle Comunità. This was a political treaty where he tried to formulate a new institutional structure and programme of the state in which industry would play a central role. For him, one of the main problems of modern society (and its built environment) was the imperfect bourgeois connection between the state and the individual. In his vision the enterprise, as a socio-economical and collective body, could offer the ideal intermediation platform between the state and the individual, in a phase in which new forms of democratic representation had to be defined. The enterprise embodied – and it still does – the true transforming factor of society, driven by scientific mechanisms and rational logic. In this sense Adriano Olivetti can be included in the list of modern social reformers, starting with Claude Henri de Saint-Simon.
          To manifest this vision, he was very much aware of the fact that the built environment could be one of the key instruments to achieve this. Architecture on the one hand and urban planning on the other. For him urban planning was “the socialisation of architecture” or “an utilitarian aesthetic to serve collective aims”. Urban planning was the scale where the collective interest can be pursued, instead of the individual one. This is for sure an important part of the history of Olivetti, if you want to understand why and how the company did what they did.

Sabeth Wiese: So, it was also a lot about the person Adriano Olivetti and his vision, which responded to the historical context of this time?

Franziska: That’s interesting, because what remains of Olivetti in the public consciousness at least in Germany – if anything – are the products. So, it’s interesting to learn now that there’s so much more behind the products, which probably helped Olivetti even more to become the iconic company they were.

So, the work of Olivetti was political, was editorial, there were many magazines about cultural topics, even concerning architecture and urban planning.

Pietro: I find this also fascinating in another perspective: there is this big entity, the modern business enterprise of a really big size, which in order to run its business efficiently needs to synchronize its parts, to keep some kind of unity to its actions. That means, it has to develop a methodology, to set up a standardized process, to configure a plan. But on the other hand, especially when it comes to Olivetti, you see this openness or let’s say capacity of being creative and innovative, without falling into a bureaucratic approach. In the 1950s Olivetti was trying to foster and facilitate this kind of process both for product design and public design. A big corporation is a complicated organisation, where the different parts follow integrated procedures. In Olivetti, a specific and general design method - we can say an organic method - was tested. A fundamental aspect of this method was the company organisation. So basically, the process became the project.

Sabeth: Do you have an example for this?

But in general, I would say that the tools that corporations use today prevent us from having a discussion that is not predetermined.

Pietro: Yes, of course! There were many architects engaged in different projects. But few of them were integrated within the enterprise, much more they were working constantly as external collaborators. The idea was that architects or the designers would connect the enterprise with the outside world, by bringing a constant up-to-date vision of the disciplines (think of Sottsass, De Lucchi, and the Memphis group). Designers were not obliged to strictly follow a corporate set policy or pre-imposed identity. Design ideas were pursued as open processes. Technicians and designers had to face constant moments of confrontation and choice. The end result depends on how the process was managed, how it was organised. Inputs like consumer research, economic and technical feasibility, and other factors, all were part of the decision-making process. And all this information had to be very well controlled and coordinated between the parts. The architects and designers had to be able to translate this information. Especially in the Olivetti case, they had to be aware of what was the social vision.
           I think this was a very special situation at Olivetti. Ettore Sottsass for example shaped product and industrial design for Olivetti, but on the other hand he was also engaged in the Memphis group. And Olivetti’s approach is, I would say, opposite to the one of Memphis. Nevertheless, this was not a contradiction. Even more, in one of Olivetti’s exhibitions on office furniture some chairs of Memphis were exhibited. There was no problem in this. I think it was very much the idea of Olivetti – not to impose something – but to be part of the discussion, which is something different. Besides, Olivetti was behind various publishing projects with very broad cultural approaches.
          If you look at today’s cultural and product policies of the big tech corporations, it is difficult to find an approach of discussion. Rather you’ll see one of imposition.

Carl Friedrich Then: Well, sometimes you get the feeling that those big corporations just try to keep up with themselves rather than doing something out of the box.

Pietro: (laughs) Exactly! But perhaps this is also due to the fact that they have less competition – or more dominance – in their sector than Olivetti had.

Sabeth: I am afraid companies are nowadays more interested in making a statement and stand out by making that statement instead of being part of a discussion. Because the discussion is always a kind of question, which also means uncertainty which also means uncertainty and this is too fragile for companies, I guess.

Pietro: I agree. But maybe today’s situations are different from then. If we look into the making of designed products, there is a whole new kind of regulating mechanism, that we cannot find before. Today’s corporations have access to enormous quantity of data. They can elaborate numbers about taste, work on algorithms to collect information they need... or directly influence us with that! Moreover, standards on the production of products have multiplied. it is a completely new setting. But in general, I would say that the tools that corporations use today prevent us from having a discussion that is not predetermined.

Franziska: That neatly ties into another question we prepared for the interview, also regarding the changes over time. We were wondering if the importance of design and corporate architecture to shape the image of a company has increased significantly since then? Put differently: Where do you see the difference between Olivetti’s past and today’s corporations like Facebook and Apple?

Pietro: Do you mean a specific corporate image in the sense of a corporate identity?

Franziska: Probably a bit broader. Sabeth, do you have another way to put it?

Sabeth: My point in our discussion was, that the representation in the public is quite important since a very long time. I am not sure whether you know about the Fagus-Werk here in Germany, which is a symbol of the 1920s? And even before that, factory buildings had a lot of ornaments and decorations, sometimes even neo-baroque. When the industry changed to a service industry, also the buildings changed. The factories became less important, so when we think about companies nowadays, only the headquarter comes to mind. So that is maybe why we think the architecture of headquarters as a representation for the corporate image is now much more important, than it was in history. But I’m not sure if I made the question any clearer… (everybody laughs)

Pietro: Oh well. I think the discussion might then be “What changed?”. What changed is also the employee world. I mean it’s difficult to compare a corporation from the 1960s with today’s corporations! In the 1950s the industry was still kind of materialistic and in presence, with workers and factories. Workers were classified (I am simplifying) in specialized and not. Within it, especially in a company like Olivetti, of precision mechanical engineering and after electronic and informatic, the working-class changed very fast. Automation appeared in the factory but also in the offices. There were visible changes in the corporate social structure, and these were investigated scientifically. Industrial sociologists at Olivetti were engaged to understand and track this mutation of the workers demographics. But they were also looking at the influences that these changes had in the outside world. Anyway, the changes in the social structure of corporations in the 1960s lead to an increase of clerks or basically white collar jobs in Italy. The HQs are generally speaking the symbol of the growth in number of employees. Such buildings became symbols of identity, generally defined, since the moment when commercial, identification and international dimension plays a major part in the business itself.
          If we want to keep a comparison on this aspect with the tech industry of today, we can only register a huge social difference. IT engineering employees and their creative staff are very different people. They work in places like the new headquarters where it is very difficult to trace the limit between what is working and what is private space. These corporations must attract mostly young talents from all over the world with specific knowledge, and their main buildings are potent weapons of attraction. Both the building and the benefits these corporations offer keep the worker within their area of influence and control. The discussions taken place in Olivetti during the 1950s was, on the contrary, to find a solution in order to keep separate work and leisure and preserve the integrity of the individual.
This was a discussion concerning especially the urban field.
          Factories of today – they still exist, we are still living in a society whose needs are met by the industry – has different kind of workers, when they are not completely robotic. In the 1950s the average worker was someone who had barely any knowledge. At the assembly line no creativity was required. So, you cannot compare it to the creative talents of today. That is to say, the structure of society changed. I am not able to suggest how people needs changed so far. The ideal of freedom, for example is a very specific topic. Olivetti in the 1950s and 1960s was really thinking of how their workers can live properly, how their family can do too, and so their community. That was a big discussion within a private body about public life. I do not know to what extent this kind of debate takes place within corporations today. There are surely some corporate responsibility ideals at Apple, for example. There are sustainable and social inclusion ideals. But I do not really know, or I have not really grasped what their social vision is… What is their idea of a real, concrete, constructed society, beyond rhetoric.

Pietro: But to be honest, one probably must have a broad knowledge of different cases and a proper approach to analyse sensitive factors. I don't have this broad knowledge. The history of enterprises is rather young and in many respects has been little investigated. So, I do not know how appropriate it is to make such comparison, because society really changed in the last 70 years and so did corporations. Anyway, I firmly think that the diachronic analysis of the topic, especially in architecture and design, deserves more attention.

Franziska: We initially perceived Olivetti as a design-centric company, but now I would call it much more a vision-driven company or so. Now I am interested in what that meant for the role of the designers at Olivetti. It seems to me that the freedom designers had at Olivetti were exceptional compared to other companies. The same goes for their recognition as well as their responsibilities, meaning that they had a lot of impact on what the product was going to be.

Pietro: I see, but I am not so confident it was like that. (everybody laughs)

OK, I mean of course, they were trusted by the directors. They were hired to participate in designing the products. Many times they had excellent ideas on how to design a product, to find certain solutions and participate in shaping a machine or a buildings. But there were of course limits to their creativity. Products must work, and their production had to be reasonable for the business. Also, sometimes certain ideas or solutions did not come from the designers. For example, the Valentine typewriter instead of presenting a leather or tissue box is placed in a plastic one. The idea was not from Ettore Sottsass or of one of the members of the design team. The idea came from the head of the commercial department, Ugo Galassi. So, the designers definitively had not the freedom to do anything they liked. Design was teamwork.

Franziska: But they were sitting at the table from the beginning, right? Because still nowadays it often feels like designers can take care of certain things but are not really involved in the process from the beginning. And at Olivetti it seems like they were much more invited into the whole process and the discussion – be it architecture or product design.

So, the design did not happen afterwards, but was part of the process from the beginning.

Pietro: They were part of the process, for sure. So, when the commercial department after market analysis suggested to develop a project, the engineers started to make prototypes together with the designers. Therefore, the people who did work on the technical part worked closely together with the designers. So, the design did not happen afterwards, but was part of the process from the beginning. Also, they worked together with the marketing department and the management on what the image of the company and its products should be. In a way there was always an exchange between the different branches and the designers. In this sense you might call it design-centric. But for me it is clear that it was a collective work. And probably most design-related work is so anyways.

Franziska: I totally agree. It is also a discussion we had more than once: that design often likes to present itself as the most important thing there is. But in the end, it is always a collective process. Or to put it differently: the result is always the result of more people than the designers. But I think design still needs to position itself as important, because otherwise it will only get involved as styling at the end of the process. It’s this conflict we often talk about. How important is design? How important is the designer or his or her work? What is he or she actually contributing? But this is a completely different discussion.

Ettore Sottsass for example shaped product and industrial design for Olivetti, but on the other hand he was also engaged in the Memphis group.

Franziska: But I guess Olivetti as a big company was really good at fostering exchange and having everyone at the table. At least that is my impression.

Pietro: Yes. In the 1960s the head of the department “Cultural relation, industrial design and advertising” was an intellectual figure – Renzo Zorzi. Before this he had written some books and a novel, and was working in some publishing houses. He was the kind of “intellectual manager”. During his duties at Olivetti, he wrote a lot about the design policy and approach at Olivetti. Since 1964, he was probably one of the key figures in all the processes that connected product design, corporate image, communication and corporate architecture. He was directing the so-called “creative part”, by keeping it linked to the interests of the company, by soliciting collaboration with other departments and by critically mediating the corporate policy towards society. He became also chief editor of the journal Zodiac, which was a magazine supported by Olivetti through its publishing house Edizioni di Comunità about architecture and other topics. The magazine was thought as a platform for international debate. For this reason, there were many international writers in this magazine and articles were published in original language. I find this particularly interesting, because if you look at one publication you have articles in French, German, English and of course Italian.

Carl: That’s funny, because at the form design magazine they did the same in the 1950s. For our blog we thought about such a multi-language approach, too.

Carl: Unfortunately, I think we should come to an end at this point. So as a last question: Would you say there are some learnings from the history of Olivetti?

The Olivetti case in Italy is also an outcome of the industrial society of the 20th century, but a mature and enlarged discussion in society took place only in the second part of the century, with the rising of the big business culture.

Pietro: I think that the Olivetti case can reveal design approaches that can maybe still be valid today. We are living in a world which is even more surrounded by industrial made objects and above all by uncertainty. Big corporations are entities with a huge social impact.
          If we accept that the process as a project is a way to deal with uncertainty, and also a way to include social discussion, to imagine today’s corporations engaging in it would mean to see companies in different positions of social responsibilities. So, at Olivetti you could maybe find some inspiration for that process, if you look at what they tried to do in the 1950s and -60s. And furthermore of course there is the opportunity to understand design in a much broader sense than just as marketing, shaping of products or designing images.

(all are thinking about that)

Franziska: I like it.

Pietro: That doesn’t surprise me. Rarely this broader history of Olivetti is known in other countries than Italy, and today Olivetti is mostly used as an example for good design.

Carl: … I guess that is how we perceived Olivetti as well …

Pietro: I also participated in a conference, where one professor presented how corporations shape their image. Olivetti was one of the examples. But it was a kind of oversimplification. Olivetti was really entangled with the cultural situation after the second world war in Italy. Behind the "identity project" was a discussion on the educational and influential role of industry in society, the corporation and the balance of power. A discourse that follows like a “filrouge” the highest debates of modernity between the wars in Germany. And I think, also in Germany there are really interesting enterprises which one can analyse in this regard.

Carl: For sure. But it is also interesting to see, that the histories of two countries, which are really close to each other is sometimes so unfamiliar. Especially in Italy there were also a lot of conflicts within the society after the Second World War until the 1990s.

Pietro: Absolutely, there are differences but also similarities. There is a German expression on the relationship between Germany and Italy: “die fernen Nachbarn”, the "distant neighbours”. Not geographical proximity but relationships and affinities unite them in history, with symmetries and asymmetries. For example, going beyond the parallels of the Nazi / Fascist regimes, after the Second World War like Germany with Konrad Adenauer, also Italy was ruled for a long time by a Christian party. A new democratic society was re-established with the impetus of the economic “Boom” (or Wirtschaftswunder in Germany): symmetry then. But the outcomes of those periods differed between countries, and the asymmetries are easily recognisable. Perhaps urban space and the built environment offers itself as one of the best areas of investigation in which to test a comparison of approaches and results. In Italy outcomes were, generally speaking, disastrous. Italian urban history is studded with great missed opportunities. Especially if they are compared with debates and ideas that were circulating through the elites, intellectuals, architects or urban designers.
          If we also look at the industrial history of the two countries, we will find significant differences. In the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century Germany experienced an accelerated industrial development, especially through the heavy industries and their exploitation of raw materials (coal and iron). Then also through major technological breakthroughs: think about the role of Siemens or AEG with electricity for the development of cities and other industrial sectors. Italy, on the other hand, did not experience such developments at the beginning of the 20th century but only later after the Second World War. The Werkbund and the Bauhaus, arise from these accelerated upheavals in the German society, and from an intellectual debate at the highest level among the leading figures of culture, design, industry and politics. The Olivetti case in Italy is also an outcome of the industrial society of the 20th century, but a mature and enlarged discussion in society took place only in the second part of the century, with the rising of the big business culture.
          To conclude, more comparative research should definitively be encouraged.

Franziska: Definitely! We would really look forward if there would be more of this. This is a lot of food for thought. Thank you for your time and the interview!

Sabeth: Thanks!