Olivetti Identities. Spaces and languages 1933 - 1983

Olivetti’s world-famous typewriters epitomize the company’s industrial legacy and visible identity, which was both innovative and complex, material and immaterial. These identities are at the heart of an interdisciplinary research project carried out by ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne and the University of Ferrara, in collaboration with the Olivetti Historical Archives Association in Ivrea. Olivetti Identities. Spaces and languages 1933-1983 presents the results of this research, with contributions from 37 authors, analysing the Olivetti phenomenon as a whole and paying particular attention to corporate evolution and the approach of designers such as Xanti Schawinsky, Carlo Scarpa, Ettore Sottsass, Hans von Klier, Egidio Bonfante, and Walter Ballmer, among others. The book examines the development of Olivetti’s corporate identity, from the opening of the Olivetti Advertising Office in 1933 to that of the permanent Olivetti pavilion at the Hannover Fair in 1983, seen as the final step in a particularly efficient corporate identity strategy. Divided into four sections, the work covers showroom and exhibition design at trade fairs and expos, as well as the languages that shaped the corporate vocabulary: visual communication and interaction design, cultural and promotional activities. Designers Santiago Miranda and George Sowden, along with former Olivetti sales and training employees, add their own personal accounts in the final section, while two visual essays of published and unpublished documents from the Olivetti Historical Archives complete the book