History

Adriano Olivetti's ambition for his company extended far beyond typewriters: he understood Olivetti as a cultural actor whose presence in a place should constitute a contribution to the physical quality of that place. When he commissioned a Venice showroom, he chose Carlo Scarpa — an architect who had spent thirty years working in Venice and who understood, as almost no contemporary did, how to construct with stone, marble, mosaic, and glass in a city whose building tradition was defined by those materials.

Scarpa designed the Negozio Olivetti between 1957 and 1958, working within the three narrow arcade bays of the Procuratie Vecchie, a sixteenth-century building whose arcades are the northern enclosure of Piazza San Marco. The formal problem was severe: the space is deep and narrow, lit only from the arcade front. Scarpa's solution was to treat the whole interior as a series of laminated surfaces in different materials — the marble floor mosaic in small black and white tesserae, the suspended staircase in Aurisina marble, the display platform in translucent stone with internal lighting, the side walls in teak panelling — each element at a different depth and angle, creating a spatial complexity that the volume itself does not suggest.

The showroom opened in 1958 and remained in operation as an Olivetti retail space until 1997. After Olivetti's exit, the space was altered and used for other purposes. The FAI acquired it in 2007 and undertook a full restoration under the direction of architect Guido Pietropoli, reopening in 2011. The restoration recovered Scarpa's original colour palette — most significantly the panels of green Aurisina stone and the staircase, whose chromatic weight had been altered in subsequent decades.