Presentation

L’Ufficio Moderno, a ‘journal that studies and solves all business problems,' emerged in the historical context of the 1920s, a period marked by significant transformations in the discourses of corporate culture, politics, and the arts. These domains underwent a process of renewal, acquiring new and complex meanings. Terms such as 'office,' 'rationalization,' and 'advertising' serve as key concepts through which this exhibition seeks to interpret the linguistic shift of that era and the broader cultural context this shift mirrored.

The key term 'office' recalls the title of William Henry Leffingwell’s 1917 work, Scientific Office Management (Chicago – New York: A.W. Shaw Co.). In this publication, Leffingwell shifted the focus of managerial theory from the factory to the office. While the factory had symbolized the transformation of manufacturing processes during the earlier industrial revolutions, the office was becoming the workspace where the foundations of the growing service industry were being laid—a sign of a new structural change in the economy following the industrial shifts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For Leffingwell, office work could be broken down into a series of simple, measurable tasks, performed in sequence and capable of standardization. The 'modern' office thus embraced and applied the Taylorist principles of scientific management, participating in the broader effort to increase productivity—no longer achievable through technological progress alone.

Rationalization is the term that best captures the defining features of corporate culture in the 1920s—an era marked by an obsession with measurement, classification, order, and organization. This obsession, in the aims of the Fascist regime, was meant to permeate and unify all spheres of life, from everyday activities to creative expression, including architecture, art, design, and fashion.

Advertising of L’Ufficio Moderno. L’Ufficio moderno. Anno 3, n. 1 (Jan. 1928).

Advertising was no exception. However, what most clearly distinguished it from other forms of creative expression was the significant delay that separated it from the more advanced international context. In Italy, advertising graphics remained largely the work of individual artists, whereas elsewhere, advertising messages were already the result of complex corporate structures. Within the Italian landscape of the time, two opposing aesthetic approaches to graphic design coexisted. The first was rooted in Art Nouveau and its various national interpretations—known in Italy as Stile Liberty. The second embraced a more austere visual language: clean lines, minimal ornamentation, and a spacious, deep sense of composition. In this context, advertising language reflected the dualism typical of Fascism, which promoted a modern mass society moving towards economic development while preserving deep and stereotyped national traditions.

In contrast to the ambiguous and contradictory coexistence of modernity with a self-celebratory revival of the past, L’Ufficio Moderno adopted graphic choices that reflected an international outlook and deliberately avoided prewar stylistic conventions. The advertising of Italian products— central to Fascist autarchic policy—thus became, paradoxically, the clearest evidence of the genuinely antifascist stance of the magazine’s founders and contributors. Nowadays, L’Ufficio Moderno stands out as a unique, original, and engaging historical source for the study of Italian corporate culture and advertising, as well as of its clients and creators.