After Olivetti

After Olivetti is a public conversation developed by Communal Matters as part of the GENS Public Programme, Biennale Architettura 2025. Hosted at the Speakers’ Corner in the Corderie dell’Arsenale, the panel brought together Aurora Pizziolo and Giorgio Nepote Vesin to critically revisit Adriano Olivetti’s legacy.

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Olivetti’s notion of community occupies a singular position in the history of Italian modernity: a vision in which architecture, industry and social ethics converged into a territorial project. Rooted in Ivrea and the Canavese region, this model sought to reconcile production with collective welfare, culture and landscape. Over time, however, that vision has been institutionalised and mythologised — becoming emblematic of a lost harmony between enterprise and society.

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After Olivetti proposed to re-read this legacy not as a model to restore, but as a field of tensions: between utopia and paternalism, centre and periphery, project and lived space. Through archival references and spatial case studies — including Scarmagno and La Serra in Ivrea — the discussion unpacked how the idea of “community” was materially constructed, narrated and contested.

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Rather than celebrating a heroic narrative, the conversation foregrounded its contradictions and silences. What forms of exclusion accompanied its progressive rhetoric? How was spatial order used to organise social life? And what remains today of that horizon of coexistence when reconsidered through contemporary practices of care, commoning and situated design?

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By demythologising Olivetti’s project, After Olivetti shifted attention from the image of the enlightened enterprise to the lived materialities through which communities continuously negotiate themselves. Not nostalgia, but re-appropriation. Not restoration, but critical re-imagination.