93 taste, including I �uaderni di Sociologia and Casabella, and writing editorials that never came to terms with power (to the point that the anti-fascist periodical Tempi Nuovi, founded by his father, was gagged and closed in 1925), and subsequently signing essays based on his sociological vision of work and State that made the history of ideas. But above all, Adriano Olivetti sealed the importance he entrusted to the interdisciplinary nature of dialogue by inaugurating, in 1946, Edizioni di Comunità, publishing house that featured milestones of international thought – the likes of Søren Kierkegaard, Max Weber, Simone Weil’s – alongside the publication of magazines that marked the step of an era thanks to their quality of contents, their authoritativeness of contributions, their sophisticated graphic line. Historical titles such as Comunità, Rivista di Filosofia, Sapere, SeleArte, Metron-Architettura, Zodiac, Tecnica e Organizzazione and L'Espresso, weekly founded in 1955 by Eugenio Scalfari and Arrigo Benedetti, thanks to the majority participation of Adriano. An involvement that, in 1957, Adriano had to sell - deciding to do so for free, to transform a suffered act into a symbol, irreducible at any price – because pressured by his shareholders and his own family members, as a consequence of the boycott wall raised by Confindustria, which invited all associates not to buy the company's products, due to the critique of the reigning capitalism that the newspaper moved through its investigations, and that Adriano supported through his own conduct, human and humanist, before than entrepreneurial. The chemical engineer who spent evenings consulting the I Ching; the layman who, in moments of doubt, opened the Bible on random verses, looking for inspiration within them; the captain of industry who considered it essential that his applicants could attend a calligraphic exam11, in order to better understand their character before a possible recruitment; this man was all too human, in its most original and noble sense, to have to respond only to the logic of growth, making himself guilty of cancelling that of progress. Above all, beauty. Here lied the greatness of his method. the olivetti method Born in 1955, Jeffrey Schnapp is a lecturer in Industrial Design at the Harvard Faculty of Architecture, where he also holds the position of director of MetaLAB – a prestigious international research center which integrates humanistic and digital culture through the dimension of the most innovative design. The course is based on the in-depth study of fifteen objects of Italian design that have contributed to internationalizing the excellence of Made in Italy – from the autarchic shoes, made with non-imported materials such as cork, patented by Salvatore Ferragamo in 1937, to the Campari Soda bottle designed in 1932 by Fortunato Depero and still on the market today, and to the 1946 Vespa V98 Farobasso conceived by Corrado d'Ascanio. Among these fifteen objects, two of them – Ettore Sottsass' Valentine and Mario Bellini's Divisumma – come from Olivetti. «Regarding the ability to develop new forms of reality starting from new forms of thought, I always remember the architecture and design of Bauhaus in Germany, the American avant-garde in dance, music and architecture conceived at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and the counterculture and cyberculture that, in California, have been humus for the Silicon Valley experience. To these three references, I think Adriano Olivetti must be added, with his blend of industrial efficiency and social action, technological frontier and sense of beauty. Adriano Olivetti was an anomaly. But it was not a mistake of history. Adriano Olivetti was your history, able to integrate humanistic culture and technological vision, books and industrial design, social thought and the world of the factory. There really is a specific Italian, which is both in history and outside of it» Jeffrey Schnapp, in: Paolo Bricco, "L’Italia ripartirà con modelli sociali generati da innovazioni culturali", Il Sole 24 Ore, 03/25/2019 The Olivetti method, in history and outside of it as a unicum from which one can only learn, teaches how everything is linked, fluid and essential to beauty, a tireless research that only makes sense if it is oriented towards sharing a better life. There can be no aesthetic advancement, a product cannot be considered beautiful, if the price to pay is the sacrifice of even one person’s quality of life. The Olivetti method is a unique body in which work beats like the beating of a heart, because Olivetti's cycle of beauty comes to life within a project-based, ethical and aesthetic organization of work. 11 Emblematic was the episode in which he discarded an applicant after the calligraphic exam, arguing: «I don't need a pessimist by my side», or when he analyzed his own signature, as his commercial director Ugo Galassi testified, having seen in it «some sign of weakness; he interpreted that flourish that, from the letter V, enveloped the surname as a voluntary element, an impetus towards the future. Ultimately, he considered himself a person inclined to the imagination, to art, a man looking ahead» (in: Valerio Ochetto, Adriano Olivetti. La biografia, Edizioni di Comunità, 2015).
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