'Universo Olivetti: Community as Concrete Utopia' reveals how, between the 1930s and the 1960s, Adriano Olivetti, fulfilled the dream of a visionary landscape in Ivrea, Italy, creating new sustainable patterns of relationship between the city, the territory, modes of production and the people, always at the forefront of design and the industry globally.

The relevance and modernity of Olivetti’s legacy are demonstrated by the recent addition of lvrea, industrial city of the 20th century and its most significant architecture to the UNESCO World Heritage List. Now, the Universo Olivetti exhibition allows us to understand how, between the 1930s and the 1960s, Adriano Olivetti achieved the ideal of a visionary landscape, creating new sustainable patterns of relationship between the city, the territory, modes of production and the people — an example that remains at the forefront of design and the industry even today. Curated by Pippo Ciorra, Francesca Limana e Matilde Trevisani, the exhibition is organized by the Matosinhos City Council, Istituto Italiano di Cultura, and esad—idea, Research in Design and Art, under the scope of the Italian Embassy in Portugal, and promoted by the Italian Ministero degli Affari Esteri e della Cooperazione Internazionale, in cooperation with MAXXI and the Fondazione Adriano Olivetti.  In the Olivetti world, the plant was the driving force of Adriano’s reform project, at once entrepreneurial, political, cultural and social. Adriano built his Community by surrounding himself with the brightest minds of post-war Italy: architects, philosophers, designers, intellectuals, and engineers. By the mid-1950s, they led the company to define an Olivetti style and took the first pioneering steps towards the development of electronics and computer science, a technology that would be employed by NASA to land humans on the moon in 1969. Opening programme: 5 pm – Opening and guided tour to the exhibition 6 pm - Talk with the curators Francesca Limana (Fondazione Adriano Olivetti) and Pippo Ciorra (MAXXI – MAXXI Architettura), and the Portuguese iteration curator Maria Milano (ESAD / esad–idea) Pippo Ciorra is senior curator of architecture at the MAXXI museum in Rome, and also architect, critic and professor of design and theory at the School of Architecture of Ascoli Piceno/University of Camerino, where he coordinates the Villard d'Honnecourt international PhD programme. Francesca Limana is Director of Communications, Digital Media and Editorial Projects at the Fondazione Adriano Olivetti, having overseen the acquisition of some of Olivetti's most important archives and being responsible for enhancing the foundation's documentary heritage through online and offline exhibitions.  Matilde Trevisani is Director of Programming and International Relations at Fondazione Adriano Olivetti. She’s also a founding member and CEO of Teach for Italy and she has collaborated with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and UNESCO on projects related to gender equality, education and world heritage.