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Introduction
Does the built environment capture or shape the spirit of the age? Can modern corporations build communities that serve the shared interests of workers, managers, and shareholders? Many nineteenth-century company towns combined corporate paternalism with social control, looking to architecture and city planning to mediate the conflict between capital and labor. Notable examples include Grand-Hornu, the Belgian coal town; Pullman's railroad car factory south of Chicago; and Port Sunlight, the Lever Brothers soap factory in Liverpool.1 In the 1930s, the Bata Shoe Company rebuilt its hometown, Zlin, Czechoslovakia, and built Bata-villes around the world in the same spirit, as did the fascist company towns of Wolfsburg, Germany (Volkswagen), and Torviscosa, Italy (synthetic textiles). None came close to realizing their utopian aspirations.2 As Fritz Lang's screenplay for Metropolis (1927), their cinematic counterpart, famously stated, the "mediator between head and hands must be the heart," dressed up in appropriately futuristic architecture.
Davide Maffei's Prospettiva Olivetti and Paradigma Olivetti and Kogonada's Columbus,3 unapologetically aimed at film festival crowds and critics, explore the complexities and contradictions of modernist architecture through the legacies of two corporate devotees, Adriano Olivetti and J. Irwin Miller, and the modernist company towns they built. Heirs to family fortunes and second-generation CEOs of their respective companies, Olivetti S.p.A. and Cummins Engine Company, Olivetti and Miller shared the conviction that modernist architecture and design played a critical role not only in the economic health of their firms but also in the civic health of their surrounding communities. They hired A-list architects to design their factories, office buildings, and showrooms, as well as churches, schools, banks, libraries, hospitals, housing, and recreational facilities for their corporate hometowns of Ivrea, Italy, and Columbus, Indiana.
Olivetti S.p.A. and Ivrea, Italy
In 1932, Adriano Olivetti became general manager of the eponymous company founded by his father a quarter century earlier, already famous for its impeccably engineered and manufactured typewriters. To prepare him for his eventual accession to the top of the company, his father sent him on a study tour of U.S. manufacturing facilities in 1925. He visited Ford's Detroit plants, as well as the Underwood, Remington, and Corona typewriter factories, to observe the latest American ideas of scientific management and mass production in operation, even...