[HN Gopher] Olivetti's Ivrea
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Olivetti's Ivrea
Author : rbanffy
Score : 133 points
Date : 2024-10-26 20:13 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (medium.com)
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Utopia, Abandoned: The Olivetti Town_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20864548 - Sept 2019 (24
| comments)
| david927 wrote:
| Ivrea is beautiful. I've been there multiple times for the annual
| orange-throwing festival. Incredibly fun and recommended.
| sph wrote:
| For the uninitiated:
| https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/carnival-battle-of-the...
| sach1 wrote:
| My granddad worked in Olivetti's Buenos Aires factory in the
| 1960s (he had made foreman due to knowing enough Piedmontese to
| impress upper management). Workers there had access to:
|
| - Worker's social club, complete with pool
|
| - subsidized housing at cost, rent-to-own
|
| - a wholesale "majorista" style shop where they'd buy in bulk and
| sell to workers' families at cost.
|
| Say what you want about the fault of paternalism, at least they
| were thinking about employee welfare. Argentina's economy sucked
| at the time and they had to close. The factory now produces
| cigarettes under a phillip morris subsidiary (iirc).
| viciousvoxel wrote:
| I finally got around to visiting here last spring and it was
| really interesting. It was beautiful and eerie and a bit
| dystopian in how everything is abandoned or at least partially
| abandoned (some buildings are still partially in use). Note that
| you need to book a tour to go inside any of the buildings, and
| make sure to choose a day when the tour is in your preferred
| language. The tour included very detailed explanations of the
| history and philosophy behind the buildings and the town -- it
| was also quite long (~4 hrs IIRC). I'd also recommend going into
| the actual town of Ivrea if you make it out there.
| CalChris wrote:
| I worked in the factory. I remember it well even from the one
| photo. The factory had a Winchester Mystery House air about it.
| It had been added to many times over the decades. So it was more
| like Rome and less like Turino with no obvious way to get from
| here to there. They made typewriters there well into the 80s.
| Olivetti had commuter buses in Ivrea and Milan well before Google
| buses were invented. They had wine at the company cafeteria for
| lunch. It was the 80s and I would bet my boss an ice cream on NBA
| games which I already knew the scores of from an email. Hotel La
| Serra was structured like a typewriter. A river runs through
| Ivrea and it had a kayaking center.
|
| I'd love to go back and take a tour.
| tomcam wrote:
| Lovely reminiscences. Are you a Yank? What did you do there?
| CalChris wrote:
| Yank working there via the Olivetti ATC in Cupertino. Worked
| on Unix and other stuff. There were quite a few Brits there
| doing tech writing. A couple of Australians as well. It was
| very cosmopolitan but it was a deserted city in August. There
| was even a big concert in July before everyone left for
| vacation.
|
| Many (most?) of the Italians did not like it but it was work.
| They really wanted to be home. Same with Milan, a city to
| have a job in but then you'd go home on weekends if you
| could.
| tomcam wrote:
| Fascinating to hear these details. Thanks.
| Animats wrote:
| > I'd love to go back and take a tour.
|
| It's a ruin now.[1]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7XEa7tC7xU
| dewey wrote:
| I just came here to post that too, watched it a few days ago
| and it was interesting to see. For me the company was always
| just cheap cables in the electronic store and old computers
| at school.
|
| I was not aware of the rich history of the company.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Their product design was nothing short of brilliant. It was
| Apple well before Apple.
| CalChris wrote:
| The Macintosh had come out but I don't remember hearing
| about Jobs visiting. I read later that he met with
| Sottsass but he when was at Studio Olivetti. (Think
| meeting Jony Ive at LoveFrom rather than Apple). I
| remember Gates visited Ivrea. There was a printed list of
| restaurants with reviews by the expats. One was annotated
| that Gates had eaten there. It was pretty good.
|
| Gates saw Olivetti as a customer for his MSDOS. Jobs saw
| Sottsass+Olivetti as a design inspiration.
| rbanffy wrote:
| They were doing brilliant industrial design since well
| before Apple existed.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _Olivetti had commuter buses in Ivrea and Milan well before
| Google buses were invented_
|
| Italy has both megalopoleis and very sparse small centres.
| Ivrea is in the northern part of its region (north of Turin);
| if you consider that the southern half is said to not really
| have a main city but seven towns of equal beauty and worth (the
| even lesser ones not really minor), you get the idea of the
| sub-region as a very sparse megalopolis embedding its
| countryside.
|
| When enterprises chose to move at least part of their activity
| from their town of origin to the central area (of Turin) for
| logistic convenience, it became sensible to organize systems
| facilitating the movement of your workers, that easily
| gravitated around the original town.
|
| Edit: as you wrote elsewhere, <<[there is a] city to have a job
| in but then you'd go home [when possible] if you could>>.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| See also:
|
| _Ivrea, industrial city of the 20th century_
|
| https://artsandculture.google.com/story/ivrea-industrial-cit...
| chvid wrote:
| Absolutely beautiful. I can see that it is now a World Heritage
| site:
|
| https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1538/
| znpy wrote:
| The way i heard the story, after Adriano Olivetti died politics
| and politicians finally had the chance to sack and split the
| pie... and split they did.
|
| Carlo De Benedetti is no random john doe. They basically led the
| decline of olivetti.
|
| They had no vision for the company , and they actually were
| antagonists to it: Olivetti was an exceptional company that
| proved wrong both left and right, but proved particularly wrong
| the left, and they just couldn't bear it. They just couldn't bear
| the living example that it is possible to run a company in a
| capitalistic manner while also caring for the human beings and
| treating them well.
|
| So they dismembered it, little by little.
| eecc wrote:
| I don't get it, whenever I read some American commenting on
| anything I roughly agree with, it invariably takes a sudden
| turn, devolving into an arbitrary accusation against the Left,
| Communism or Socialism.
|
| You're obsessed folks, calm down
| RandomThoughts3 wrote:
| I am from France and I would say the same thing they do.
|
| The traditional left here has been and still is extremely
| detrimental to the country as a whole and has kept from their
| communist roots - that's where most of the old guard has been
| formed - an extremely strong tendency towards control where
| they would rather destroy anything successful not coming from
| them than see it prosper. It's even more sad in France
| because the main left wing party used to be dominated by its
| social democrat wing and be somewhat apt to govern but is now
| decimated and subservient to other more extreme parties which
| are completely disconnected from reality. Not that the right
| is any better. They are more and more fascist by the day.
|
| We are on a trajectory to do the same mistakes Italy did.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _the same mistakes Italy did_
|
| Italy, I understand, also had had a tradition of
| conciliation and search for common grounds, a call to the
| common good. (A drive helped by the fight against a common
| enemy before the half of the past century.)
|
| The grave mistake is polarization, those steps towards a
| "cold civil war" (that seems now so common around the
| world).
|
| But before that, allowing the twisted stagnate in their
| dumb lowly positions (like said taste for <<destr[uction]>>
| and <<disconnect[ion] from reality>>), in the disgregation
| of the societal spirit - a root of the abovesaid
| polarization. It is a lurking entropic phenomenon requiring
| active correction, normally through debate, through
| "talking", productive confrontation; it is not absent in
| these pages.
| znpy wrote:
| I'm not American. You should stop assuming everything happens
| and only happen in the us.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I'd say that running a profitable company in a socially
| conscious way is proof that the drive for profit above
| anything else that characterises capitalism is misguided.
| Olivetti could be more profitable if they didn't care so
| much about the well-being of their workers and their
| families, but they proved they can, and that is better than
| maximising shareholder value at any cost.
| lnsru wrote:
| The owner of the company I work for sold it to the big corp.
| Colleagues remember the times under the owner with a great
| sadness. He helped everybody in trouble and was super generous.
| The owner had same revenue with half of the employees of now.
| There is definitively a way of combining profitability and
| caring for human beings.
| agys wrote:
| The former "Olivetti Study and Research Centre" was also the base
| of the "Interaction Design Institute Ivrea" (2001-06) where
| Wiring, Arduino and Processing were born...!
| chasil wrote:
| Olivetti also owned ARM/Acorn for a time.
|
| If they had held it, Italy would be playing a much larger role in
| embedded electronics.
|
| https://www.elleeseymour.com/2012/02/24/how-olivetti-stitche...
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