Borgo Olivetti social housing

Luigi Figini e Gino Pollini, 1939 – 41

On the long perimeter side of the nursery is the Borgo Olivetti Social Housing, a multi storey building with balcony access designed by Figini and Pollini in 1939.

The building was the first to be built in a vast national building programme launched by the Fascist Institute for social housing which in Ivrea saw the active participation of Olivetti. Destined to host 24 families of employees in flats laid out over 4 floors above ground, the building runs along a north-south axis with the living rooms and bedrooms set out on the south side and the bathrooms and stairwells on the opposite side.

The ground floor with service areas is interrupted by the entrance stairs allowing to access the upper storey on which are the front doors to the apartments. The trees in between the social housing and the nursery were part of the original design and appeared in a subsequent project in 1951 by Luigi Figini.

The formal composition of the building is in harmony with modern international architecture models from the 1920s and 1930s and can be attributed to simple geometric shapes which in social housing is influenced by the room types and construction as shown in the use of the wood finishes on the balconies and the stairwells which employ solutions adopted in current middle-class buildings. Many of the composition elements and architectural features of social housing have become part of contemporary residential solutions for employee housing put forward by Sa.ce.po., the Olivetti employees cooperative.

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