Have you sat in the perfect chair that looks fabulous and feels fantastic? Ever typed on a laptop whose slim design and low-lying keyboard make it seem like your fingers are flying as fast as your thoughts come? Good design is when successful form and function meet. In modern design, you might incorporate technology as well. I came away thinking about these ideas after watching “Modernism, Inc.: The Eliot Noyes Design Story,” playing at the M.V. Film Center on Tuesday, August 12.
Director and writer Jason Cohn presents a multifaceted profile of Noyes (1910–77), who dedicated his career to blending beauty with utility, using footage of the designer as well as interviews with historians, academics, colleagues, and children. Cohn helps us see how Noyes’ modern design principles shaped postwar corporate culture and the broader consumer landscape. “Good design is good business” was his mantra.
You may never have heard of Noyes, but if you are familiar with the IBM logo or its Selectric typewriter, or the circular canopies and pump islands of Mobil gas stations, then you have come across his work. As we learn, Noyes’ expansive career was central to modernism’s rise, its love affair with corporate America, and the eventual backlash against the modernist vision.
Noyes began as a disgruntled architecture student at Harvard in 1932, disillusioned with the old-fashioned curriculum. He thrived, however, when he started studying with Walter Gropius, the German Bauhaus School founder, who took Noyes under his wing, training him in the Bauhaus core idea of the unity of art, craft, and technology.
We learn from design historian Alice Twemlow that “Eliot Noyes had a purist view of modernism: the deep-seated belief that design could be at the core of building a future society.” This included improving the relationship between people and products. We see this in his role as the first director of the Department of Industrial Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, from 1939 to 1946. In his 1940 exhibit, “Organic Design in Home Furnishings,” Noyes promoted a pioneering, elegantly functional, stripped-down European aesthetic over the overdesigned American furniture of the era.
Cohn then places Noyes’ career within the broader context of the postwar years, describing how magazine and TV campaigns encouraged Americans to buy new houses and sleek consumer products, many made with new industrial materials. The film’s narrator explains how the originally patriotic ideal of modern consumption, however, shifted into a push by manufacturers for excessive consumption, much of which Noyes believed involved shoddy products.
Within this context, Noyes dedicated his career to enhancing corporate design standards. The journey of how he became essential to the complete transformation of IBM’s modern aesthetic — from stationery to office equipment and early computers to architecture — is compelling. He played a key role in shifting the company from its prewar, outdated look to a postwar emphasis on ultramodernism. He did the same with Mobil, Pan Am, Xerox, and Westinghouse, among others.
However, as time moved on, the dissonance of the 1960s and 1970s counterculture sparked a backlash against the modernism practiced by corporate America. Noyes became synonymous with how large companies controlled design culture. A key moment occurred in 1970 when he was president of the International Design Conference in Aspen. That year’s theme, “Environment by Design,” sparked a conflict between established designers and ecological activists who crashed the conference. The latter criticized Noyes and his colleagues for promoting consumerism and environmental harm. We see one man angrily demand, “Stop the furthering of unnecessary consumption of resources whose sole purpose is the creation of profit, and therefore a destructive force.”
What happened next marked a turning point in Noyes’s career. But the film ends with his relationship to the Vineyard. I Interviewed his son, Fred Noyes, who told me, “We came in 1955, spent a summer, and my father absolutely fell in love with the Island. He bought a piece of land and built our house in 1956. Then he built three other houses for clients.” In the film, Fred’s sister, Derry Noyes Craig, says of her father, “It was his happy place.” Fred comments, “It was the ease of living, especially in those early years. Chilmark was a ‘nonplace.’ If you came here with more than a couple of pairs of shorts, you were going to be overdressed. He was under enormous pressure as a major architect and designer. My father loved the idea of being able to wander down to Menemsha Pond and get into a Sailfish, or go clamming, or to the beach when you didn’t need beach stickers.”
Fred will be sharing images of his father’s work from the Vineyard after the screening, as well as his take on Noyes’ career: “He was trained as an architect, but he expanded the architectural reasoning to places it had never gone before. Gropius gives him credit for taking the architectural sensibilities and moving them sideways into industrial design, and then goes on to designing the corporations themselves.”
When I interviewed Cohn, he reflected, “Among the designers of the mid-century period, Eliot Noyes is a little bit forgotten, even though he was enormously influential. One thing that was important for me was that his name comes up when we’re having discussions about the great American designers of the mid-20th century.” He continued, “I also wanted people to think about the relationship between architecture and design and corporate power — the tradeoffs and sacrifices that society makes when really talented problem solvers like architects and designers put their talents to corporate work when they could be going to other types of work.”
“Modernism, Inc.: The Eliot Noyes Design Story” screens at the M.V. Film Center on Tuesday, August 12, followed by a discussion featuring Fred Noyes, architect and son of Eliot Noyes, and others. For more information and tickets, visit mvfilmsociety.com.
