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The special issue of the Museum of Modern Art’s bulletin companion to the exhibition Olivetti: Design in Industry, October-November 1952, on page three articulates the underpinning concept of integrated design, “It is the purpose of this exhibition and bulletin to encourage our industries in the battle for good integrated design by illustrating the excellence of the Olivetti program. Not only is it pleasanter to write on a beautiful typewriter, not only is it pleasant for employees to work in a handsomely designed factory and live in well-designed housing, but it cannot fail to be profitable in many ways, even perhaps in terms of money, to present all the visual aspects of an industry so that they become […] a trademark to the world.”

Olivetti was founded in 1908 by Camillo Olivetti and declared the first Italian factory manufacturing typewriters. In 1938 took the helm his son, Adriano, the man behind the legendary Lettera 22 and Lexikon 80 both currently part of the MoMA Design Collection. As scholar Caterina Toschi (NYU Florence) articulates “The 1950s was the decade of the Olivetti company’s rise on the U.S. scene, with the 1950 opening of the Olivetti Corporation of America—OCA at 580 Fifth Avenue in New York, headed by Adriano’s brother, Dino Olivetti.” Moreover, in 1952—while still mainly based in a post WW II semi-rural Italy—Olivetti opened an electronics research laboratory in New Canaan, Connecticut.

In March 1979, Olivetti was the subject of another exhibition. This time in Los Angeles at the Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery at the University of California (UCLA). Curated by Nathan H. Shapira the exhibition was titled Design Process. Olivetti 1908-1978. Because of the anthological nature of the exhibition—coinciding with the closing chapter of the Olivetti pioneering research—Shapira could further clarifies the concept of integrated design by illustrating how integration is only possible through a very peculiar design process of cross-pollination among all arts. In fact, as he points out “This exhibit looked at Olivetti as a renaissance contemporary company in historical perspective. This exhibition recognized that Italian industry really carried on the legacy, history and tradition of the Italian arts, sciences and production. This creative legacy personified and distinguished Italian design ingenuity and manufacturing in a unique manner. In this manner, Italian art and design personified a harmonious linkage between visual expression, creativity and utility. This was personified through a poetic romanticism between art, form, and function.”

As a Rome-based young architect propelled by these same ideals, in 2007 I worked in the planning department of architect Paolo Soleri’s urban laboratory Arcosanti (in northern Arizona), exploring the conviction that architecture is a practice incorporating all the fundamental spheres of living.

In the last 15 years, while practicing architecture and construction, I made mine the Olivetti’s imperative according to which “production and esthetics, efficiency and design, rationality and beauty had to be aspects of the same composition.” In other words, integrated design and the fruitful process begetting it.

I think and lead STABILE architecture | construction with the assumption that every architecture firm is an all-encompassing system of social and cultural values. Despite the many compromises that each project inevitably demands due to the specific socioeconomic context that—nevertheless—makes it possible, our daily practice is guided by Olivetti’s definition of culture “culture in its authentic meaning of the disinterested pursuit of truth and beauty.” Culture is not a mare uniformity of style but a practice-wide awareness—from the first sketch to erecting the structure to the client moving-in—of the cultural responsibility as architects forging designs that implement Earth’s finite resources.

Inspired by Olivetti’s Integrated Design and Shapira’s concept of “a poetic romanticism between art, form, and function”, at STABILE architecture | construction we approach each design holistically. Any project idiosyncrasy is the opportunity to create episodes of beauty. Moving through space is spiritual, and making good design is a testament to it. That is why I decided to develop a series of ceramic murals that could partition, like veils, open floorplan spaces or—when thought of as murals—amplify the surface of the architectural volume. 

I first experienced the synergy of clay art and architecture while working with architect Paolo Soleri at his urban laboratory of Arcosanti (in northern Arizona high desert)—Soleri worked for Frank Lloyd Wright in the late 1940s and received important acknowledgments over the span of his career including an AIA Gold Medal, the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion, and the Smithsonian Medal for Lifetime Achievement.