For three decades, a small Italian town in the foothills of the Alps was the center for radical new ideas around industry and community. Ivrea, some 30 miles north of Turin, had been the headquarters of typewriter manufacturer Olivetti since the company was founded by Camillo Olivetti in 1908. Between 1933 and the late 1950s, under the dynamic new leadership of Camillo’s son Adriano, the town was transformed into an experimental utopia, promising a humanized approach to the organization of labor.

Adriano believed passionately in the social responsibility of industry: Olivetti employees enjoyed benefits that were unparalleled in Italy, including flexible working hours, free childcare and access to affordable housing. A socialist with an interest in urban planning, Adriano expanded his father’s small redbrick factory into a sprawling complex of glass and steel, hiring some of the greatest names in Italian modernist architecture to create light-filled workshops. To encourage employees to educate themselves, Olivetti built reading rooms and libraries and offered courses in culture and engineering. The canteen building was imagined by Ignazio Gardella as an oasis of calm, immersed in the natural landscape, while Luigi Figini and Gino Pollini’s nursery was described by MoMA as the most distinguished building ever commissioned by a company.

Design had always played an important role in the company. The very first Olivetti typewriter, launched in 1911, was bold and simple with a careful color scheme—aesthetically appealing rather than mechanically innovative. Under Adriano, design came to be considered as important as technology or management, leading to products like the iconic Lettera 22, designed by Marcello Nizzoli and launched in 1950.¹ The modernist architecture that Adriano commissioned for his utopian company town had a similar focus, where through function and beauty the factory was not only to be a place of production but the driving force behind the economic and social development of Ivrea. As Diane Ghirardo, a professor of architecture who writes about Italian modernism, explains, “He really believed in a notion of work where you could engage with the world, where you could grow and prosper.”

Most people would have encountered Adriano’s vision at the La Serra Complex, an imposing steel structure that was situated—unlike the company’s factories and offices—at the edge of the cobbled, historic center of Ivrea. Comprising a hotel where Olivetti’s international staff would stay when visiting the company’s headquarters, and a cultural center that included a movie theater, auditorium and restaurant, the complex was open to all residents of Ivrea, not just employees. Though it was built after Adriano’s death in 1960, the complex, designed by Iginio Cappai and Pietro Mainardis, is the most visible symbol of Olivetti’s legacy in Ivrea.

Despite some early success in computing, Olivetti failed to keep pace with a changing industry and the company was eventually broken up. Today the La Serra Complex,  like much of the Olivetti-built town, lies empty and unused. In 2018, UNESCO recognized Ivrea as a World Heritage site, and many rediscovered the town through a New York Times piece by Nikil Saval; the comments section of the article became a community forum for those who worked for Olivetti and for people who had visited the town.  The bold, visionary architecture remains a ghostly monument to Adriano’s utopia—a physical embodiment of the nostalgia shared by thousands in Ivrea and around the world for a fleeting moment of harmony between the demands of industry and the individual.