Oh, the memories. I bought one in the US the instant I learned about them and wrote the first half of the book
Frank Lloyd Wright and the Johnson Wax Buildings on it. To have ten characters stored (in my model) for effortless erasure was a triumph of technology I had not been able to imagine.
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Jon Lipman AIA
Jonathan Lipman, AIA & Associates
Fairfield IA
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Original Message:
Sent: 08-20-2020 09:54
From: Nikolaus Philipsen
Subject: How a 40 Year Old Design Made My Day
On the lighter side, a musing about the power of design:
On a grey and thickly humid East Coast Corona day in my home office, my assignment was sorting through some 63 years of community association files. I had finally resigned after 24 at the helm and needed to compile the many records into something my successor wouldn't find entirely repugnant.
Looking back such a long time didn't make the confinement of the home office more satisfying but gave it perspective. Maybe being thus tuned to old stuff made me discover that my wife had stowed a vaguely familiar large plastic box under my desk. It wasn't quite as old as the files I was sorting, but hailed back almost 40 years. The dark anthracite molded cleanly shaped plastic box looked modern and I decided to open it after a decades long hiatus.
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| A company and its products: Icons of the 20th century |
In it, I knew, was a once prided possession, for which I had paid a fortune in the hard German Marks that were the currency in 1982. I had considered it worth to be shipped across the Atlantic to the New World, even though I knew that the cherished product would be neither needed in a household that had already advanced to the next technological level, nor would it be functional in a land with 110 voltage when it was built for 220V. The two prong plug would not fit and the language it was designed for would make its interface less practical in the New World.
I am talking about my Olivetti Praxis 35 electric typewriter which, revolutionary then, had some electronic features such as being capable of storing a full line of text for delayed typing and revisions, should the writer mind change within a few words. The anthracite colored Olivetti, Italian Design already then fabricated in China, is foremost notable for its elegance, beginning with the matching clam-shell carrying case. It is pure fashion model compared to the then prevailing beige, pink, or red IBM Selectric. Olivetti, an Italian company is so known for its design that it had its own museum exhibits, in 1952 at the MoMa and as recently as 2012 in Milan ("Programmare l'arte: Olivetti and the new kinetic avant garde"). The MAXXI Muesum in Rome held a series of lectures about Olivetti in 2018 (Lezioni Olivettiane).
The electronic typewriters were the logic transition between the electric machine and the new technology to come, the computer. When the first Apple computer was released, in 1976...
READ FULL ARTICLE HERE)
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[Klaus] Philipsen FAIA
Archplan Inc. Philipsen Architects
Baltimore MD
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