For its second consecutive year the AA – together with the Adriano Olivetti Foundation and Gehry Technologies Europe – returns to the former Olivetti headquarters in Ivrea to explore contemporary logics of architectural production in relation to the speculative work environment of the near future.

In reclaiming the local tradition calling for a complete industrialisation of the architectural project, we will first dig deep into the architectures of the Olivetti factories in order to nurture our instrumental ideas in relation to the ‘high prefab’ project of the 1960’s: we will collect and classify grids, components and material assemblies to construct an architectural DNA for our design experiments.

Object-Oriented and Associative design strategies will be deployed to process these ‘original parents’ with the aim of displacing the strategies that have dominated modern architecture – modularity, repetition and homogeneity – and propose new, prototypical forms of industrial buildings for the information economy.

Inspired by the rich Olivetti aesthetics, we will produce precise technical drawings, numerically fabricated models and large scale individual posters addressing radical relationships between architecture, computation and contemporary subjectivities.

Olivetti Complex in Scarmagno - Ivrea - Building Site - M.Zanuso 1968