Work, Dignity and Beauty: The Olivetti Model

In the heart of the exhibition dedicated to Giovanni Pintori, the brilliant artistic director of Olivetti, one breathes an idea of work that goes beyond productivity: work conceived as a tool for emancipation, culture, and beauty. As May 1st, International Workers’ Day, approaches, thoughts naturally turn to Adriano Olivetti, the visionary who transformed the factory into a laboratory of civilization.

A humanist entrepreneur, he conceived the company as a social and cultural actor. In postwar Ivrea, libraries, publishing houses, training centers, and model neighborhoods stood alongside the assembly lines. He envisioned a factory not just as a place of production, but as a space for culture, citizenship, and collective responsibility. The company was not a machine merely for generating profit, but a living organism, rooted in the local territory and at the service of the community.

Through the language of design, Pintori made the values of Olivetti tangible: the harmony between function and beauty, between innovation and social responsibility. His advertisements, essential and poetically functional, still speak today of a model of development based on the centrality of the individual, the quality of time and space, and the dignity of work.

Today, in the era of digital platforms, liquid work, and relentless productivity, Olivetti’s vision appears almost revolutionary.
Talking about work means questioning time, health, the environment, and denied or erased rights.
But it also – and above all – means reopening a reflection on what it means to work well, for oneself and for others.

In our time, marked by precariousness, hyper-productivity, and environmental crisis, the Olivetti project – and the aesthetic that narrated it – offers highly relevant insights.
Rethinking work as a place of meaning, and not merely of profit, is perhaps one of the most urgent cultural challenges. 

In this sense, art and design once again become tools of political imagination.