I was born in a house of many typewriters. All the members of my family used Olivetti typewriters for work reasons or to type down their thoughts and keep them in order and the recurrent noise of the typebars hitting the platen is definitely one of my earliest (and to tell you the truth at times quite annoying...) memories.
Many things changed around myself, but the typewriters still surround me: occasionally my young nephews sit in front of one and tell me they're writing a poem or a novel. In my personal history, Olivetti typewriters are therefore linked to happy memories and I must admit that in the last few months while considering the Italian financial and political crisis, Adriano Olivetti often came to my mind.
Celebrated last year also in one of the sections of the Italian Pavilion during the 13th International Venice Architecture Exhibition (through images, books, adverts and obviously typewriters), Adriano Olivetti was an enlightened businessman with a strong interest in art, architecture, culture, design, graphics, politics and town planning.
As a young man he developed in postwar Italy the factory that he inherited from his father Camillo and turned it into a cutting-edge international business, focusing on electronics in the early 1950s.
Yet Adriano Olivetti is also remembered as an innovator, a urban planner, a multifaceted intellectual, and a politician. Rather than just running a business, Olivetti experimented with new welfare models that could have improved society.
He often employed scholars, sociologists, economists, artists and architects in the company’s production activity and in sectors apparently foreign to them. Throughout the years he worked with many famous architects including Carlo Scarpa, Vico Magistretti, Gae Aulenti, Ettore Sottsass, Michele De Lucchi, Kenzo Tange, Louis Kahn and Le Corbusier, among the others.
Olivetti thought industry had an ethical role and firmly believed in a city organised as a place of social meeting. He created industrial complexes with homes and services capable of offering the workers the best conditions of social and cultural life, turning into this way boring industrial sites into factory cities and experimental modules.
Olivetti also contributed to the publishing sector through his magazines, writings as editor and publishing houses NEI (Nuova Editrice Ivrea) and Edizioni di Comunità.
Many Olivetti products became symbols of excellent Made in Italy design, winning important awards and later on became part of the permanent collections of many museums across the world, including New York's MOMA.
While Olivetti products may be part of prestigious collections and while the architectural works the entrepreneur built in Ivrea were officially chosen as candidates for UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites last year, Adriano Olivetti is often remembered as a model who can help us facing up the global crisis and rethinking new strategies that can link innovative industries, civil society and culture.
Bearing all this in mind, thinking about my personal history and remembering that this year marks the 105th anniversary of the Olivetti company, I came up with this typewriter necklace.
The main elements, the rabbit-shaped (yes, they do look like cute rabbits View this photo) typebars (note: it can be a bit of a hard job to disassemble them one by one, especially if you don't have the proper tools, and Olivetti typewriters are pretty solid, so it can take a few hours of work to destroy one and then clean all the pieces you need...) are taken from an Olivetti "Lettera 42" typewriter I rescued from a second-hand shop (you see, I can't disassemble my family's heirlooms).
The main aim of this piece was transforming industrial remnants, creating something with a different meaning and a new kind of beauty that indirectly told my personal history, while referencing the history of Italian design and of the unknown person who owned that typewriter.
I reassembled the typebars with some Meccano-style pieces as a reference to industrial materials, but also to Adriano Olivetti's playful and creative imagination.
Since it's made with Meccano pieces, the necklace can be disassembled and reassembled in different ways, and this hints at two things - first the construction and mechanics of language and how single letters form words and sentences; second Adriano Olivetti's policy focused on giving people a variety of opportunities.
"Design is a question of substance, not just form," Adriano Olivetti once stated. "It’s a tool a company uses through its products, graphics, and architecture to convey an image that is not just simply appearance but a tangible reflection of a way of being and operating".
I wonder what he would think if he saw some vital parts of one of his products being turned into a decorative piece of jewellery. Somehow, I think that, deep down, he would approve.
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