Working in the landscape. The Olivetti factory in Pozzuoli. History, form and preservation

The Olivetti factory in Pozzuoli (Naples, Italy) was designed in 1951 by Luigi Cosenza (1905-1984) on commission by Adriano Olivetti (1901-1960). It represents an outstanding case study, since it deals with a typically modern architectural theme, and develops it in an original way, raising a number of issues addressed by the conference. The industrialization of a geographic and socio-cultural context – that inherits a rich historical tradition, dating back to the Greek foundation of a site of great landscape value – is confronted with the modern aspirations to right to work, health, and human dignity. The Olivetti factory illustrates a research that was developed within the frame of philosophical conceptions and political implications, related to the above mentioned issues. It affirms the ideology of a project that aims to combine work and social spaces, and it also carries out buildings of great significance from the point of view of landscape and urban layout, as well as form and language. While industrialization has often been wounding landscape, this factory has actually re-founded the territory and has added historical and cultural values to the geographical one. With regard to its architecture, this factory does not adhere to that twentieth-century aesthetic trend, which would emphasize the severe, though appealing look of the industrial construction. The buildings in Pozzuoli do not look like a factory, but reveal rather the distinctive feature of Cosenza's rationalism that draws on the international architectural debate as cultivates its own cultural heritage. Slender columns, supporting projecting horizontal slabs hanging at different heights, usher you into the factory. Once through the porch, nothing is reminiscent of the warehouse building type, you are rather in front of an articulate urban-scale layout that dialogues with the site on which it rises. The buildings are placed according to a cross-shaped layout, and are characterized by a structural span, which is repeated throughout the complex. The diaphanous boundary between inside and outside is free from structural constraints, because the pillars are shifted away from the building outline. The architecture dialogues with the orography, casting glances at the landscape, and is also embroidered with lights and shadows, drawn by brise-soleils and projecting shelters, as well as enriched by the colourful palette of Marcello Nizzoli (1887-1969). The greenery designed by Pietro Porcinai (1910-1986) is not a mere natural background, on which the architecture stands out, but is rather a part of the composition. The urban plan had been conceived as a foundation layout for future extensions that were actually carried out during the first half of the 1960s on a project by Cosenza himself, and later on at the end of that decade. The factory – that does not produce typewriters any longer, but houses several educational, research and telecommunication centres – has expanded without altering the balance achieved by the architect among nature, architecture, living spaces and places of work. Criteria for the safeguard of the Olivetti factory's social meaning, as well as its spaces and elements, derive from its analysis and evolution through time.