The Tech Issue
ARCHIVIO opens its third editorial cycle: four thematic issues, each curated by a Guest Editor with deep expertise, offering access to worlds where past, present, and future converge.
The third issue, ARCHIVIO N°11, focuses on technology and is curated by Massimo Banzi, co-founder of Arduino, together with Cecilia Botta, technology historian and Head of Memories at Promemoria Group, the magazine’s publisher. Daniela Hamaui oversees editorial direction, while Alessandro Gori shapes the art direction.
The cover, designed by artist Ailadi, pays tribute to the early aesthetics of the digital age. Created using PETSCII, the character set of Commodore 8-bit computers, it evokes the visual language of technology in its formative years.
ARCHIVIO N°11 maps the international landscape of technology archives, tracing the roots of the digital revolution and exploring the places where our technological past is preserved, along with the collectors and institutions that recognized its cultural value.
The issue is structured in three sections — Stories, Institutions, Collectors & Collectives — and includes a special poster: an (in)complete mapping of Italy’s technology archives, researched by Promemoria Group and visually interpreted by Accurat.
Massimo Banzi,“Often the most important innovations are the ones people talk about the least. The 6502 powered machines that defined a generation: these computers processed dreams, turning teenagers into programmers and hobbyists into entrepreneurs.”
Guest Editor
Glimpse of the Month
Brionvega.
The Factory of Beauty
By Daniele Ferrazza
In the golden age of Italian industrial design, Brionvega, and its heritage of radio and televisions holds a place of honor. There was talent in Venetian entrepreneurs Giuseppe Brion (1909–68), his wife Rina Tomasin (1919–2002), and his son Ennio (1940–), who enlisted some of the most prominent designers of the period to put their spin on Brionvega’s consumer electronics products. Rodolfo Bonetto, Franco Albini and Franca Helg, Marco Zanuso and Richard Sapper, Achille and Piergiacomo Castiglioni, and Mario Bellini and Ettore Sottsass are the designers commonly associated with this company. It was founded in 1945 in Milan as B.P.M.. It became Brionvega in 1960—a date that marked the beginning of a long and successful series of collaborations, which led the company to win the first Compasso d’Oro in 1962, with the Doney television designed by the Zanuso-Sapper pair.
