OLIVETTI: DESIGN FOR ITALY

...Comunita really grew out of the astounding experience of the Ing...

...is incorporated for profit and is owned by the family...

...nobody in Italy thinks any more of Olivetti as typewriters, but, rather, as Comunita...

...Now there are regional Comunita organizations and cultural centers for Comunita in all the big cities of Italy...

...G. Olivetti Co...

...He's a revolutionary and, in a world where revolutionaries are a dime a dozen, a radical revolutionary...

...The ruling class, calling itself Christian, is decadent, says Olivetti, both in politics and in business...

...Olivetti's office machinery, his plants, his classrooms, nurseries, and housing projects, his advertising and his display rooms (like the one at 580 Fifth Avenue, whose marble and murals staggered New York) are all marvels of modern design...

...it rich man's plaything, this Comunita, something to do when you're tired of making still more beautiful typewriters...

...True, the State has given land and houses to thousands of farmers and workers, "but all of this has remained apart from their inner lives, because the new government agencies have lacked the human quality that would enlist men's souls in a common ideal...

...It was something brand new...

...Everybody knows the story of Camillo and his dozen workmen in their little red-brick shop in Ivrea, but I bethought me to ask Adriano about his grandfather, Camillo's father, and I learned that Grandfather Olivetti had been, until the revolution of 1848, a peddler confined to the Ivrea ghetto...

...That there is beauty in mechanics and manufacture is strictly an Anglo-Saxon notion, and the Italians are not Anglo-Saxons...

...Capitalists deplore it, even more vigorously than communists and fascists, as an assault (which neither communism nor fascism makes) on the centralization through whose hidden management, behind whose curtains of Christian democracy, the rich and the clever exploit the poor and the simple more effectively in Italy than anywhere else in Europe...

...Making the world's best typewriters under the world's best conditions did not interest him except as an isolated solution of an isolated part of the problem...

...the person has no place and no role: "In the present political situation, man seems like a weekend guest...

...And in this head is the only new idea in Italy: an idea that has to do, not with machines at all, but with men, an idea that goes right straight back to the Italian insight that joy is the heart of beauty...

...a pretense that is wearing thinner and thinner, ever less competent to move the masses from torpor, ever less adequate to reach down to their personal needs or even to their common material needs...

...The answer, my friends, is beauty, beauty informed by joy...

...if then, and the length of this sentence is as a swallow's flight compared with one of Hardy's, and its complexity as a tomcat's conscience compared with the complexity of Proust's...

...Underneath the case of the Olivetti typewriter—designed by an artist who has nothing to do with machinery—is substantially the same machine that Adriano's father, Camillo, began manufacturing in Ivrea in 1908...

...the modern (or modernized) Italian town is marvelously drab, as drab as K.C., Kan., and much more drab than Levittown, L.I...

...The Empire State Building is not a thing of joy, in its concept, construction, or use...

...Being poor is not what matters...

...It no longer has the energy or the intelligence to cope with the situation...

...The builder of the Empire State Building neither knows nor cares whether he is building the 52nd or the 152nd floor, or of what...

...And it is a rich man's—although the Olivetti investment is small compared to the investment of the townspeople who build it...

...Joy loves not order...

...Here grown men are studying, on their own, again engineering and sociology and philosophy...

...Adriano Olivetti can no longer keep up with the calls all over Italy for help with the new Comunitas...

...And in this Italy there is an anomaly: Ing...

...The Italians are incompetent soldiers (as Machiavelli observed), incompetent fascists, incompetent democrats, incompetent bureaucrats, and incompetent manufacturers—all because they do not separate beauty from joy...

...It is Christian, and it is socialist, and the Italian people, says Olivetti, simply and axiomatical-ly, are Christians and socialists...

...The American visitor who sees the individual worker at Olivetti serenely smoking a cigarette or picking his teeth is seeing something he never saw before...

...And it all goes back to joy as the heart of beauty...

...The other school at Olivetti has tables and books, but no desks and no instructors...

...You have seen enough MILTON MAYER is spending the year in Europe gathering material for articles and lectures...

...machines are nothing," you are listening to a man who makes the best machines by making everything of men...

...The beauty in mechanics and manufacture is incidental to its utility, if at all...

...The visitor who cannot understand the Catholic Communist in Italy can not understand the Italian necessity to illuminate the mechanics of subversion with the joy of salvation...

...He doesn't say how he got that way, but I have my suspicions...

...Fine talk—and then what...

...Actually Olivetti is, as an industrialist, the enlightened paternalist now fairly common in the United States...

...Under these conditions, a company which offers some small inducements can get any man it wants...

...And—in Catholic Italy—that Adriano's mother had been a Protestant...

...The Italians are anarchists (and unheroic anarchists) because beauty distracts them from duty...

...Of his company's $25,000,000 annual gross, 55 per cent comes from foreign sales...

...The two consequences of his idea are that a job at Olivetti is the best job in Italy and that Olivetti makes more money than any other unsubsidized industry in the country...

...It awaits the redemption of man, by the new man, molded by experience and sorrow, finally conscious of his liberty—liberty understood as an immense undertaking to the glory of God, right pitted against violence, the weak against the mighty, intelligence against force, courage against acquiescence, poverty against selfishness, wisdom and knowledge against haste and improvisation, truth against error, love against indifference...

...How come, then, Olivetti, the great manufacturer, in, of all places, Italy...

...being nothing is what matters...

...Then one day in 1949, less than ten years ago, Adriano Olivetti sat down with some farmers and workers in the little village of Palazzo, near Ivrea, and they talked and talked, and a man named Genesio Berghino said he would give all his life savings to the building of a community center, tie said he would give his work, too, and asked who would join him, without money, but only with work, as equals in the new community...

...When I asked a sour-puss Swiss, long resident in Italy, why the Italians do not celebrate Mardi gras, he said, "They don't have to...

...the North with its irreducible two million unemployed (and four million partially employed), creaking with industrial inefficency, state-subsidized monopoly, and shoddy, high-production-cost factories...

...Item: Everyone knows that the piece-work system dehumanizes the worker by taking bread from his children's mouths every time he takes a 30-second stretch...

...Or, item: There are two kinds of schools (besides the model nursery and kindergarten) at Olivetti...

...Because their output is low and their country undeveloped, their intake of pasta is high, and the pasta calls for wine, and the wine, both of its own potency and its inflationary effect on the pasta, makes them sleepy, and they enjoy sleeping...

...C. Olivetti Co.^ although the two institutions are not formally related...

...doing in Italy, if, as is indeed the case, Olivetti is the biggest manufacturer of office machinery in Europe and the best manufacturer of office machinery in the world...

...Berghino was not a learned man like Olivetti, and when somebody asked him why he was doing it, he said, "Because thinking of these things makes me feel good...

...When Adriano Olivetti says, "Men are everything...

...So the unions, without attacking the piecework system as such, fight for more and more stretches...

...when a man gets a job, any job, he hangs on to it...

...A beautiful machine is still a machine, and the man who makes it is still a mechanic...

...Each lasts two years...

...Three out of four families in Palazzo belong to Comunita there—but Comunita helps the fourth in time of need, because Comunita means community, and no one sickens or starves or freezes alone...

...Their centers they build themselves, and manage themselves, with their own hands and their own hearts, and Adriano Olivetti established the Comunita publishing house, which produces the books they need, and the lectures and seminars, on health and medicine, on child and maternal care, on agricultural techniques, sociology, philosophy...

...In the modern State, functioning through "the machinery of the central bureaucracy, the half-light of government commissions, and the hidden power of party apparatuses," there is no democracy...

...The machine is fine, but the finished typewriter is the first typewriter in the world to be beautiful...

...Four-fifths of every Olivetti worker's wages are guaranteed, and this amount must be adequate to his individual financial need...

...so, to the Italians, it is not a thing of beauty...

...What, then, is Ing...

...The fact is that the Anglo-Saxon genius for mechanics and manufacture disintegrates on the southern slope of the Alps...

...just to enjoy them...

...For the Italian believes that joy is the heart of beauty, and there is no joy in a manufactured contraption, or in its manufacture...

...Because the Italians are anarchists their output (except of children and joy) is low and their country, at bottom, as undeveloped as Greece or Spain...

...Now there are fifty of them, spreading out all over the north of Italy and down toward the helpless—and up to now hopeless—south...

...The answer is beauty...

...Comunita after Comunita rose in the villages of the Canavese district around Ivrea...

...If there is no joy (and therefore no beauty) in manufacture...

...The Italian genius—as you may have heard—is for beauty...

...Now the French know how to say joie de vivre, but the Italians know how to do it...

...Of course the American manufacturers copied it—but meanwhile Olivetti was putting out beautiful adding machines, beautiful teletype machines, even beautiful filing cases...

...He does not take part in any new democratic institutions, nor in patterns of associated life that might guide him to emancipation and liberation...

...An Italian takes whatever he can get...

...The Comunita elected its own officers, and the townspeople, down at the very bottom of the old parliamentary heap, decided whether they would build a road,-a school, a hospital, and instead of running from one office to another in Rome, for months and for years, they went ahead and built, each sacrificing according to his ability, Genesio Berghino sacrificing the most...

...Joy makes the Italians the world's best designers (as well as its worst manufacturers...

...I do not think that anything can stop Adriano Olivetti in Italy...

...Put a "floor" under him, that's what...

...Communists and fascists deplore it as a capitalist dodge...

...It's true...

...The beautiful architecture of Italy antedates the invention of manufacture...

...So what, when a man like Olivetti starts thinking in these terms, to do, to preserve the incentive and the human being...

...By paying Italy's highest wage, providing ideal working conditions, and maintaining a social welfare program which (in an impoverished country where public welfare is next to nonexistent) includes eight months off wtih pay for new mothers (and nurseries after that until the children are ready for school), Olivetti gets more and better work out of his people than any Simon Legree ever got...

...this in spite of the fact that the Olivetti Co...

...Everybody wants to work at Olivetti...

...I do not think that anything can stop him because he has hit the Italian chord—the beauty of things done by people who, when they think of those things, feel good, beauty at whose heart there is joy...

...Classes and laboratories were set up, where peasants learned to save their vines from blight, with the help of the factory workers, whose need for farm food, and gardens they in turn helped meet...

...Every Center has television, drinks, and an elected sports director...

...C. Olivetti Co...

...the worker therein, whether it's flag-pole gothic or gent's-room baroque...

...Some day—but not today...

...This idea, which already rules some fifty villages around Ivrea, Adriano Olivetti calls Comuiuta...

...You have to understand that in non-communist Europe, with its static caste structure and its elaborate apprentice system, there is very little job turnover in any case...

...Half of them vote for the Christian parties, which are not socialist, and the other half for the Socialist parties, which are not Christian...

...Adriano Olivetti, engineer, industrialist, and millionaire, is what most American industrialists once called a dangerous socialist (most Italian industrialists still call him that...

...The Palazzo Comunita established itself at once as the third party with the town church and the town administration in the common governance of the village...

...Communists, fascists, and capitalists know that Olivetti, traitor not to his class but to class itself, has hold of something that threatens them, not from the top (where they threaten each other with parties, ministries, bishoprics, and the "trade union vote"), but from the very bottom, where the Italian people, their pawns for good or evil, are...

...In one, over drawing boards at regular school desks, with instructors, are the 14-year-old sons of workers who, having finished their free public schooling, are learning engineering plus sociology and philosophy at Olivetti's expense...

...we must get on—somebody ought to find out why the Old Church peoples, Roman and Greek, of southern and eastern Europe have so much better a time than their brethren liberated by Calvin and Luther...

...The employment—even the happy employment— of 12,000 mechanics is peanuts...

...What is needed is nothing less than a new society, and "a new society is not created by adding a cross, be it even Christ's, to the red flag of the proletarian revolution...

...There ain't no turnover...

...Now Adriano Olivetti is a Christian, and his idea of Comunita is rooted in the medieval Christian idea of the commune...

...It is created by new men who have struck off the shackles that hold them as powerless as does any dictator in the party-system pretense that they participate in their own destinies...

...Ever more thousands of Genesio Berghinos, all over Italy, are thinking of things that make them feel good, as persons...

...Western civilization," says the manufacturer of beautiful typewriters, "today finds itself in the midst of a long and deep-rooted travail, faced with making a final choice...

...But Olivetti does not offer some small inducements...

...Olivetti is patiently, persistently, even shyly, smashing the leader-follower pattern, allowing the person, Christian and socialist, to be born...

...And in this company there is another anomaly, its president: Adriano Olivetti, a stubby, patient, persistent man with the head of William Jennings Bryan...

...And his wages—averaging $80 a month, the highest in Italy—enable him to compete in America with the American machines...

...And for two years the men of Palazzo gave up their holidays to build their community center...

...An office machinery company filled with nurseries, gardens, libraries, and artists (Picasso did the mural for the Olivetti showroom in Milan) sounds like the dream of the paternalist come true, and I suppose it is...

...It was new, personal democracy, making new men...

...and if there is no joy even in the manufacture of baby-buggies, whose ultimate consumption might beguile the manufacturer into a smile borrowed, in advance, from the ultimate consumer's mother, then there is certainly no joy in the manufacture of office machinery, for the ultimate consumption of office machinery is more doleful than that of the coffin, consumed in quiet...

...Italian art to know that the Annunciations, M-ac-C's, and Ascensions outnumber the Crucifixions and the Pietas...

...His father, Camillo, for whom the company was named, was the first typewriter manufacturer in Italy (where, incidentally, the typewriter was invented, in 1855...

...he wanted to beautify the society, rotten with undesign (and therefore with disharmony and joy-lessness) to which the happy 12,000 and the unhappy millions went home at night¦ Beautifying society is a diversion of rich dilettantes and poor reformers, but Olivetti is a rich reformer...

...And like every Comunita since, its heart was the library, because Italian towns have no libraries, and the people need to educate themselves...

...and Italian labor, under constipated capitalism, is in long supply...

...Joy unconfined is the cause of their overpopulation, and they keep their overpopulous children up half the night (who, walking the Italian streets, has not remarked it...

...Still, the piece-work system has the advantage (both to the worker and the boss) of incentive...

...But Adriano Olivetti is not a paternalist...

...if then, I say, the manufacture of office machinery is the quintessence of joylessness, how come Olivetti, and in Italy...

...After two years they get university scholarships from Olivetti, and after university they, unlike their fathers, are professional men, in no way bound to Olivetti (where, however, they are more than likely to want to work...

...They're always celebrating...

...It is hyperbolic—but suggestive—to say that he does not care whether the workers at Olivetti are happy but, rather, whether it is possible, under capitalism, to operate an industry on a human basis...

...In four years of Marshall Plan aid, the Italian national income rose 36 per cent, but workers' real wages rose exactly half of that, peasants' still less, and inflation eats away at the gain while the Italian Parliament continues to debate whether the Constitution adopted more than seven years ago should be applied...

...they are Olivetti workers, paid their full wages for two years of self-education, at the end of which they are Olivetti foremen...

...But this is inequitable to the workers (one worker needs more time out, another more money, than another) and (given the legitimacy of the profit system) to the boss, and inequity means conflict, and conflict also dehumanizes man...

...And the Socialists—more particularly the Communists and their allies—offer the Italians half of their heritage, a better living condition based on the same conflict and hate, the same State bureaucracy, the same reconstruction from the top, that is strangling Italy and France and threatens every parliamentary, party-system nation, including, says Olivetti, the United States...

...We sell them," said the conductors, "to the Italians...

...And nobody in Italy, including die party politicians, thinks it's a plaything...

...Adriano Olivetti was out for bigger game...

...But is it a plaything...

...the viewer thereof, whether he's looking at Giotto's tower or Grandma Moses' silo...

...he has to—which is why 6,000,000 Italians vote Communist and another 4,000,000 Left-Socialist...

...the other one-fifth he can earn or not, in whole or in part, on a piece-work basis...

...It offers a whole new way of working and living, because Adriano Olivetti has an idea...

...So the Italians slept, and sleep, the South ridden by primitive cultivation, tenancy (the owner taking half the crop for rent), illiteracy, and propagation...

...And when, added to this European fact, a great labor surplus exists, as in Italy, it is no surprise that there is no Italian expression for that American term "turnover...

...That is what I came to Ivrea, where Olivetti is, in the Canavese hills above Turin, to ask about...

...Comunita is a rich man's threat to the established disorder of Italy...

...he's only 56 years old, and 'the best young men in the country have come to surround him...

...being a machine, being a vote, a digit, when it is men who are everything...