Olivetti, an Italian company, commissioned Kahn in 1966 to design the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania building for the manufacture of their Underwood line of typewriters and related products.

[1] The key design limitation was that the factory floor needed to be as open as possible to enable rapid reconfiguration of equipment to meet changing market requirements.

A precedent was the "Great Workroom" in the Johnson Wax Headquarters, which was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and completed in 1939.

[4] Renzo Piano, a young Italian architect with an established practice in Genoa, used his connections with the Olivetti company to gain the equivalent of an internship with Kahn for several months while the factory was being designed, working primarily on the roofing system.

[5] Piano went on to become a noted architect himself and in 2007 was chosen to design an additional building for the Kimbell Art Museum, one of Louis Kahn's masterpieces.