97 The care of the landscapes in which the worker grew up constantly re-emerges, remaining the directional axis for the growth of the person, and, in Pozzuoli as in Ivrea, transparency represents the distinctive feature of both the factories, so that the worker can recognize himself in it and outside, feeling a sense of belonging and being strongly motivated, guaranteed by rewarding services and higher than average salaries. It is no longer the prevailing and alienating industrial narrative even told in Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927), in Modern Times (Charlie Chaplin, 1936), or in The working class goes to heaven (Elio Petri, 1971, released in the US as Lulu the tool); Adriano Olivetti's factory is redemption, not suffering. The second outpost of the Olivetti method, after the factory and its living appendage, were the stores, a fundamental moment of encounter with the audience of consumers that nourishes Artistic Capitalism. The answer to the need for beauty that Adriano’s Olivetti gave lied in presenting products as works of art, worthy of spaces conceived as galleries: large windows, displays enhancing the single object, installations designed by stars such as Gae Aulenti for the store of Paris, real paintings, sculptures and bas-reliefs commissioned to great artists (again in Paris, for example, Paul Klee, Marc Chagall, Giorgio Morandi, or in Rome, for the first Olivetti shop in 1945, Renato Guttuso13) to subliminally underline the common matrix of the works of art with the products for sale. Today's Apple Stores, objects with screens without keys, have totally been inspired by the Olivetti stores, objects with keys without screens, by Steve Jobs’ own admission who, during a conference dedicated to Italian design in Aspen in 1981, said he was in love with Olivetti and sought the contact with its designers, Ettore Sottsass and Mario Bellini in primis, during the phase of imagination of the most famous apple of the contemporary. Here too, two emblems. The first one, inaugurated in 1954 and defined by the Time as the most beautiful store on Fifth Avenue, is the Olivetti Store in New York designed by BBPR. A retractable display case having a green marble pedestal in the center, coming from the Runaz quarry in Val d'Aosta, on the top of which a Lettera 22 triumphantly rested – to be admired, or used to test the product, or even to leave a message – were nothing but the visiting card of what would have appeared, once crossed the enormous walnut door, almost five meters high. The green of the marble floor enveloped the whole environment, shaping sinuous stalagmites in some points, on which refined steel supports were anchored to hold the products. Polychrome suspension lamps in Murano glass, designed by Venini, illuminated the room in a spotted way, while, a little further, a large rotating gear carried continuously other models of typewriters took from the warehouse below. The rest of the space, totally empty as in a museum exhibition, focused the attention on the bas-relief of twenty meters in sand, plaster and cement by the sculptor Costantino Nivola, former director of the Olivetti Development and Advertising office. For years in Manhattan, within atmospheres recalling Mad Men, it was all about what today would be called 'flagship store', the best Made in Italy advertising ever, leaving visitors with the feeling – right, moreover – that with an advance of half century they were visiting the future. The second emblem is kind of a visual poem, and it is the Olivetti store designed by Carlo Scarpa in Venice, inaugurated in 1958 and recovered by FAI in 2011 thanks to the restoration work by Generali Insurance, the owner entity. I would like to receive from you an Olivetti visiting card in the most beautiful square in the world, Olivetti wrote to Scarpa in 1957. And Scarpa, from a corridor twenty-one meters deep by five meters wide, enclosed in the shadow of the portico containing it, obtained a light box suspended in his poem. Suspended are the steps of the staircase, generation center of the space, leading to the mezzanine, where the Olivetti products are located; suspended is Nudo al sole, the gilded bronze sculpture commissioned to Alberto Viani on a base of water in a black Belgian marble basin, around which Scarpa declared he wanted to build the store, reasoning as if for a museographic installation in which the architect excelled. There is Venice, in the stylized golden logo of Olivetti and in the carpet of colored tiles that keeps you on the ground and reminds you of its Byzantine domination; there is Carlo Scarpa, in his being a poetic artisan of space, and there is Olivetti, in his extraordinary constructive knowledge, capable of filling you with fecund beauty. A beauty, that of the Olivetti method, whose backbone is clearly the object, whose discipline is therefore design. In it, Adriano sensed a figure undermining the scourge of alienation, through the satisfaction in having contributed to producing and putting beauty in circulation; thus, industrial design becomes ethical. We still remember Enzo Mari, leader of the Olivetti designers and very close to Adriano – considered as a quite unique example of virtuous relationship between industry and design – who in 2001, on the occasion of the presentation of his volume Progetto e Passione in Florence, said he knew no work of great Masters not totally based on ethical values. And he continued: «To me, ‘project’ means changing the world». And it did, the Lettera 22 designed by Marcello Nizzoli really changed the world, the most beautiful object of the century and the most beautiful object of the Hadrianic era, the one on which not only 13 For the realization of Boogie-Woogie, an eightmeter mural painting, Guttuso chose to be paid by the hour on the basis of Olivetti workers' tariff - in: Renzo Zorzi, Gli artisti di Olivetti. Il dovere della bellezza (tr. Olivetti's artists. The duty of beauty), Edizioni di Comunità, 2018.
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