JUST OUR TYPE

Just Our Type

Carlo Scarpa and his modernist take on Venetian architecture.

Adorned with the iconic typewriters and tech pieces of the company's zenith, this is the Olivetti showroom on the northern edge of Piazza San Marco. Yes, the one in Venice. On the surface, the old merchant city appears to have done everything in its power to resist the march of time.
Preservationists have done a stellar job of keeping things a certain way, and very little happens in the city without their say. You might then wonder what business a mid-50s technology company had gutting the heritage architecture for one of their showrooms and quite how they slipped through the net. The answer? Carlo Scarpa.

Throughout his life, Carlo Scarpa was not a well-publicised figure. He mainly kept to himself, working almost exclusively in his home city of Venice. The chatter around his name grew significantly after his death in 1978 as the retrospective lens on modernism shifted to accommodate a broader church. Scarpa worked almost entirely on existing buildings. His view was that history was a continuum and that while it was right to celebrate the achievements of the past, it would be wrong not to contribute to it, lest the timeline stagnate.

That said, Scarpa was usually uninterested in some of the common practices of professional design. He wasn't officially recognised as an architect, he didn't work to rigid budgets or deadlines, used very few measurements, and rarely signed contracts. Much like Venice itself, the maxims of precision set forth by the industrial revolution simply passed him by. Perhaps endeared by this, the gatekeepers of Venetian preservation decided they liked his work enough to give him grace.

Olivetti, for those unfamiliar, was a titan of the tech industry at the time. It made typewriters, calculators, transistor computers and a number of other cutting edge products. Adriano Olivetti was a great futurist who believed his products should be as beautiful as they were functional. An Olivetti typewriter was not just a tool, but an item of furniture that one might leave out in the open when not in use. More than once, he's been compared to Steve Jobs, and while that comparison is often overused, in this case, it holds merit.

The thinking behind the Venetian showroom was that if technology was to hold any cultural legitimacy, then it must be accepted among some of the world's most important cultural landmarks. Carlo Scarpa was the perfect architect to bridge the gap between ancient and hyper-modern. A year before the commission, Scarpa had won the Olivetti architecture award, which is likely when the company first noticed him. He primarily designed art galleries, which was very telling of what sort of aspirations Adriano Olivetti had for his landmark showroom.

The thinking behind the Venetian showroom was that if technology was to hold any cultural legitimacy, then it must be accepted among some of the world's most important cultural landmarks.

The design centres around an angular staircase with steps that look like concrete but are actually made of marble. They have a visual mass that keeps them very grounded, but their structure is hidden, so they appear to float in mid-air. There's no symmetry to speak of; Scarpa once said that he began every sketch by drawing a line through the centre of the page, so he could be sure nothing was ever accidentally symmetrical. The colour palette is typical of the designer: mostly warm grey with brass embellishments, each detail slightly overindulged upon to celebrate the craftsperson behind it, but not to the extent that the exhibited works are overshadowed.

Calling it a showroom isn't strictly accurate - this was not a space best suited to sales, but more to exhibition. Nowadays, many of the typewriters remain despite the decades since their recession into obsolescence. The company itself moved on from the technology vanguard and now exists as a subsidiary of Telecom Italia. As for the showroom, it was restored around a decade ago and now functions as an exhibition space.