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Olivetti's New Canaan Electronic Laboratory Design Research Society DRS Digital Library DRS Biennial Conference Series DRS2018 - Catalyst Jun 25th, 12:00 AM Olivetti’s New Canaan Electronic Laboratory: when design meets computing ROCHA João University of Évora Follow this and additional works at: https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/drs-conference-papers Citation João, R. (2018) Olivetti’s New Canaan Electronic Laboratory: when design meets computing, in Storni, C., Leahy, K., McMahon, M., Lloyd, P. and Bohemia, E. (eds.), Design as a catalyst for change - DRS International Conference 2018, 25-28 June, Limerick, Ireland. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2018.656 This Research Paper is brought to you for free and open access by the Conference Proceedings at DRS Digital Library. It has been accepted for inclusion in DRS Biennial Conference Series by an authorized administrator of DRS Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Olivetti’s New Canaan Electronic Laboratory: when design meets computing ROCHA João University of Évora [email protected] doi: 10.21606/drs.2018. 656 The development of computer technology and its application by architectural research centres is a recent area of study. Initial research focused on the early work in design and computation that took place in university centres, their key figures and the theoretical and practical advances. Within this context, this paper aims to unveil the historical role played by the Olivetti Company and its Electronics Research Laboratory in New Canaan, US in shaping the first fully transistorized computer in the world and also in inaugurating multidisciplinary design research within the field. Founded in 1952, the laboratory worked closely with its main headquarters in Italy, introducing many technological innovations into the design process for new Olivetti electronic products. The paper draws on research conducted at the Olivetti archive, presenting a broader view of Olivetti's contribution to the field of computing and its innovative aesthetics. The work of Dino Olivetti, Ettore Sottsass and Mario Tchou was fundamental to this endeavour, anticipating what would become the concept of personal computing. olivetti, computing, design, architecture 1 Introduction The history of computing and its impact on architectural thinking and production is a developing area of study. Research on these themes has grown in recent years, focusing on particular aspects of the intellectual history of architectural computing. Studies exploring the relevance of the Second World War within this emerging field and the inception of architectural research centres are beginning to be published1. These works place particular emphasis on the development of computing in the US and in the UK, but there is still a lack of any broader historical account that includes similar developments in Italy. 1 See: Author PhD Thesis, Rocha, João, Architectural Theory 1960-1980: Emergence of a Computational Perspective. MIT (2004); Alise Upitis, Nature Normative: The Design Methods Movement, 1944-1967. MIT, PhD Dissertation, (2008); Daniel Cardoso Llach, Builders of the Vision. Software and the imagination of design. Routledge, (2005); Vardouli, Theodora (2012)."Design-for-Empowerment-for-Design: Computational Structures for Design Democratization. M.Sc, MIT. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ This paper attempts to bridge this gap by presenting an interpretation of Adriano Olivetti's decision in the early 1950s to develop a pioneering research agenda for the design, construction and commercialization of the personal computer. This vision also included a unique investment in architecture, product design, advertising and media for an industry which combined extraordinarily high standards of visual communication with a remarkable culture for disseminating developments in computing. The company Ing. Camillo Olivetti & C. was best known for its early success in manufacturing typewriters and was founded in October 1908 in Ivrea, a small city 50 miles north of Turin at the foot of the Valle d´Aosta mountains in Italy, by Camillo Olivetti (1868-1943), an industrial engineer who had studied at the Politecnico di Torino. His son, Adriano Olivetti (1901-1960), was a chemical engineer and industrialist with drive and ambition that would later make him a leading entrepreneur and patron of the arts. When he took over from his father, all Olivetti products were based on mechanical technologies and it was Adriano who gradually started to transform the company into a modern factory. Looking ahead, he predicted that sooner or later mechanical devices would reach their limits and that the future of the company lay in moving into electronics. In order to achieve this goal, by the early 1950s Adriano Olivetti planned to found a small electronics laboratory in New Canaan, Connecticut, in collaboration with another Olivetti research lab located in Pisa. At the end of World War II, Italy was a devastated country with a legacy of twenty years of fascist dictatorship, defeat by the allies and the turmoil of an internal political crisis. Alcide de Gasperi (1881-1954), the first prime minister of the Italian Republic, led the reconstruction of the country using funds from the “Marshall Plan”, drawing on the unconditional political and financial support of the United States. The post-war period thus became a fertile time for the reindustrialization of the country and Olivetti soon started to take advantage of this opportunity. 2 Dino Olivetti and New Canaan Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506), the great Venetian master, painted the San Bernardino da Siena tra due angeli around 1460, a portrait of the figure of Saint Bernardino, who is said to have visited Ivrea in 1418 and invited the religious authorities to build a convent there for the Franciscan order. The convent, which was built, became known as the Convento di San Bernardino and included a main church, and was decorated with magnificent frescos depicting the life and passion of Christ2 . It was here that the Olivetti family lived and where the six children of Camillo Olivetti and Luisa Revel were born. Dino Olivetti (1912- 1976) (the last of their sons) received a degree in engineering from Milan Polytechnic and spent many years outside Italy, particularly in the US where his work contributed greatly to the success of the Olivetti Company, although even today his efforts are still underestimated. By the mid-1930s Benito Mussolini was forging his new empire inspired by Hitler’s ambitions, but Camillo Olivetti did not share the same ideological convictions. To gain some political distance, Camillo sought to educate his sons abroad where the spirit of modernity could offer them different ideas from those that were threatening the country’s freedom. Dino went to Cambridge, US, in the late 30s, after serving in the Italian fascist military campaign in Ethiopia that culminated in the conquest of the city of Addis Ababa in May 1937. From January 1939 to May 1940 he enjoyed the thrilling atmosphere of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, albeit in a difficult political context due to the onset of WWII. He registered as a student in the Mechanical Engineering Department and took several courses on diesel engine design given by Prof. J.F. Riley before submitting a dissertation entitled “Performance test on a Sterling Diesel Engine” as a requirement to obtain his Bachelor of Science Degree in General Engineering (1940).3 During this stay he was involved in several experiments at the Aero Engine Laboratory where he also worked for a brief period of time, focusing on the optimization of diesel engines. Dino´s brother Roberto Olivetti (1928- 2 Life of Christ, 15th century, cycle of frescoes by Giovanni Martino Spanzotti. 3 Dissertation co-authored with John Vanderpoel under the supervision of Prof. C. Fayette Taylor. 20 1985) strongly supported the idea of developing Olivetti’s electronics department (Divisione Elettronica Olivetti) and, having completed a degree in economics from the Bocconi University in Milan, went on to do a Business Administration course at Harvard University in 1954. Was this affinity with US academia and mainstream industry merely fortuitous or was it the result of a family empathy with the US scientific milieu? The Olivetti family had certainly had previous contact with the US university and its entrepreneurial and research environment. Camillo Olivetti had visited the US in the fall of 1894 and had worked for a semester as an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University in California, which was a remarkable venture at that time. Moreover, Adriano made his first trip to the US in August 1925 at the age of twenty-five. This was a six-month journey involving visits to several industries including the Remington, Lincoln and Ford factories, which left profound memories and influences. In one of several letters from the period Adriano said: “I believe we are at a stage in civilization in which progress is developing in a positive, even if asymmetrical, geometric line.”4 After a period in Brasil coinciding with the eve of World War II, Dino Olivetti divided his time between Massachusetts and Ivrea and in 1950 was appointed President of the Olivetti Corporation of America (OCA), a position that he would hold till the end of 1960. During this period Dino made business trips to survey new market opportunities and was actively involved in recruiting young scientists at MIT, and also in New York and at Columbia University, for Olivetti´s forthcoming New Canaan Electronics Research Laboratory. These activities were realized as a scientific offshoot of Olivetti's headquarters in Ivrea, with the company having established an electronics research laboratory in Pisa in association with the University of Pisa to design and build the Calcolatrice Elettronica Pisana (CEP). Located 25 miles west of Manhattan and southeast of Boston, the city of New Canaan was considered part of Connecticut's Gold Coast and was the place where many of New York’s wealthy citizens had decided to settle beginning in the mid-1800s.
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