Modernism, Inc: The Eliot Noyes Design Story

IBM's Tom Watson, Jr. said: “good design is good business.” His old Army comrade Eliot Noyes convinced him that was true. Following that maxim, Watson Jr. built the company his father founded into a titan. Sadly, those who appreciate good design do not always recognize the value of good business. Arguably, Noyes was a visionary, who bridged the artistic and corporate mindsets. Viewers get a sense of how he shaped the look of the 20^th Century in Jason Cohn’s Modernism, Inc: The Eliot Noyes Design Story, which opens this Friday in New York.

Noyes trained and worked as an architect, but his lasting influence lays in the field of design. Yet, the intriguing discussion of his military service almost demands a documentary of its own. At the time, Noyes was attached to the Army Air’s little known glider program. Gliders might be largely obsolete today, but their silence offered a potential advantage during WWII.

A few years after returning home, he crossed paths again with Watson, Jr., who wanted to put his personal stamp on his father’s company. Using the elegant Olivetti showroom as an example, Noyes convinced him to spruce-up and standardize all graphical presentations of the company. As a consultant, he also played a leading role in product design, including the classically modernistic blockbuster-selling IBM Selectric typewriter.

Noyes is exactly the sort of figure whose contributions to our collective cultural lives has been criminally under-acknowledged. It is rather fitting if his career brings to mind Charles and Ray Eames, who designed the molded Eames chair, because he contracted the Eames to produce educational science films sponsored by IBM. (Probably not so coincidentally, Cohn also previously co-directed Eames: The Architect and the Painter.)

Noyes had a successful career, but the documentary is not all sunshine and success. Late in his life, the designer was deeply embarrassed when New Left activists invaded and disrupted the annual International Design Conference Aspen, which he had founded, to turn it into a stage to make political proclamations. They behaved disrespectful and chaotically, but decades later, the extremist conference-crasher Cohn interviews remains proud of his actions. Yet, this episode truly reveals how the New Left tried to impose its will, by intimidating others into silence.

Yet, documenting this incident clearly has value, by illuminating the ugliness of political extremism—a message that is important this week. The rest of Noyes’ career also offers much to learn from. Frankly, affordable housing advocates might want to take another look at his “bubble houses,” constructed with concrete sprayed over inflated ballons, even though only a handful were constructed.

Modernism, Inc. is fascinating as both art history and business history. It is important to realize those two things are not contradictory or mutually exclusive. Indeed, by understanding how art and business can work together in concert, Noyes and his clients, also including Mobil and Westinghouse, enjoyed enormous success. Highly recommended for the smart and thorough presentation of Noyes and his design work, Modernism, Inc. opens this Friday (7/19) in New York, at the IFC Center.