Steel heritage: Olivetti’s factories in Ivrea

The recent nomination of Ivrea—a factory town in the Piedmont region—as a Unesco site provides the opportunity to rediscover significant aspects of buildings belonging to its precious building heritage: namely its factories built in steel. In the incomplete history of Italian industrial architectures related to the culture of steel construction, these specific factories play an important role representing a privileged place for the testing of building technological innovation. From this point of view our paper particularly investigates technical solutions for these steel architectures, a theme not yet deeply researched. Steel becomes crucial in the realisation of the ideas of Adriano Olivetti, who, over the 1950s and 1960s, promoted the construction of such factories in order to increase company production and also to experiment with a new factory design, transforming Ivrea into a “revived Bauhaus”.