Modernism, Inc. : The Eliot Noyes Design Story

Architect and industrial designer Eliot Noyes, who, among many other accomplishments, reinvented the image of IBM and gave the world the river rock-shaped first electric typewriter, the Selectric, is called “the design conscience of mid-century American industrial giants.”

Jason Cohn’s Modernism, Inc.: The Eliot Noyes Design Story (produced by Camille Servan-Schreiber) takes us into the extraordinary world of a creator whose associates included Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, Eero Saarinen, the esteemed graphic/film title designer and Oscar-winning filmmaker Saul Bass, Philip Johnson, Charles and Ray Eames.

Studying architecture at Harvard, Noyes in 1937 was disappointed in how the broader social context seemed to have been ignored by the program, in stark contrast to the Bauhaus, whose founder Walter Gropius soon had to flee Nazi Germany and arrived at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. He took Noyes under his wing, and when the young man became the Director of Industrial Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he carried forth the idea of social reform going hand-in-hand with design. Beauty derived from an object’s usefulness. In his most important exhibit, 'Organic Design and Home Furnishing', Noyes, with the help of the likes of Charles Eames and Aero Saarinen, showed everyday objects, that would lead America into the future, chair by chair. But not yet.

The year was 1940 and the Second World War put the latest furniture ideas on hold. Noyes signed up for the Air Force, where he became head of their glider program, convincing the Pentagon of its importance in an ingenious way. Noticing that all the officers religiously read a comic strip called Terry And The Pirates in the newspaper each morning, he wrote to the creator, Milton Caniff, about the value of gliders, which prompted the cartoonist to include it in an episode two weeks later. Cohn shows us the letter from April 1944. The trick worked, and glider planes were employed not only in Burma, but Eisenhower was inspired to use them on D-Day.

After the war, the ideas of Modernism spread, consumer tastes changed, American families were buying after a decade and a half of Depression and war. Noyes, concerned about some of the grotesque outgrowths, wrote about them in his column The Shape of Things in Consumer Reports between 1947 and 1960. On-camera, we see one of Noyes’s sons, Eli, read from an article in which his father complains about “the unwillingness of manufacturers to let objects be themselves.”

Clarity of purpose was on his mind when he became a part of IBM. Thomas Watson Jr., who was soon to take over the company from his father, happened to recognise Noyes as the man who taught him how to be a glider pilot during the war. Through interviews with three of Noyes’s children, we gain insight into the family life and their house in New Canaan, which attracted Marcel Breuer and Philip Johnson to the classic commuter community and became a hub for the 'Harvard Five'.

Later in 1954, the Noyes family’s new 'house for all seasons', made the changes in nature outside part of the inside experience and featured Calder’s first Stabile sculpture, used by the kids as their jungle gym. This new house, split into two areas, as the children now recall with varying amusement, had no bathrooms in one part, which made it obligatory to cross the outside courtyard when nature called, a special design wink to the outhouse of old.

Cohn’s documentary begins the journey back to the mid-century heyday of Modernism at New York’s Astor Place, where in the glass façade of the present-day IBM headquarters is mirrored the city’s architectural past in the shape of the famed Wanamaker department store, built in 1896. Differences in the zeitgeist and shifting attitudes in corporate America influence design. We see a 21st century IBM employee wearing a dog-print sweater, with a faux leopard coat draped on her chair and a real-life King Charles Spaniel sitting on her lap while she is working at her office desk on her laptop. The attentive faces of the young team the present head of design at IBM, Katrina Alcorn, addresses, are no longer those of all-white males in suits and ties, who get to decide your desires.

On-camera interviews with design historians, former and present IBM employees, the Noyes children, his biographer, owners of a house designed by him, and others, give us insight from many angles into this multifaceted, diplomatic man. From how Noyes as Consulting Director of Design at IBM influenced every aspect of the company to his collaborations with the best designers in their fields, from the big red O in the Mobil Oil gas stations to impactful creative methods of management - Modernism, Inc.: The Eliot Noyes Design Story is filled with information and inspiration that elegantly carries over from the last century into this one.

Cohn, who previously made a film about Charles and Ray Eames (Eames: The Architect & The Painter), cleverly selects archival footage that often provides ancillary commentary beyond the question at hand. For instance, in a casually sexist and clairvoyant ad for the marvelous technology of the Selectric typewriter, we hear a snippet of the audio stating “Now if they only invented a typewriter that could spell.” The Eames’s IBM short films and their interactive exhibit, Mathematica, in the mid-Sixties, were meant to change people’s perceptions of the company through overloading them with multi-screen projections.

When near the end of his career in the Seventies, Noyes, then President of the Aspen Design Conference think tank felt out of touch with the new ecological movement and recycling pioneers, you can’t help but think that he shouldn’t have felt disheartened, and that really it is a continuation of what he had been about all along, from his Gropius days onward. Because his motto that “good design is good business” always included a much broader social and environmental context, without which good design is impossible.