Eliot Noyes (1910–1977) was the grand master of “good design,” or what is known as Midcentury Modern. Having studied architecture, in 1938 Noyes joined former Bauhauslers Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer’s firm in Cambridge, MA. Next, from 1939–1946, Noyes was director of industrial design at MoMA. Years later he opened his own design consultancy in Connecticut that served major American corporations, notably IBM, Westinghouse, Mobil and Cummins, where he introduced the revolutionary practice of design and aesthetic consistency in everything from architecture and products to graphics and identity, hiring consultant practitioners including Paul Rand and Charles and Ray Eames.
Now, a new film from Jason Cohn celebrates Noyes. Cohn is the Peabody Award–winning director of The Architect and the Painter, a film about the Eames duo. Modernism, Inc: The Eliot Noyes Design Story premiered at the New York Architecture + Design Festival in 2023 and will have have a general release later in 2024. I recently saw it for the first, second and third time. I admit to knowing a little about Noyes from Gordon Bruce’s Eliot Noyes biography, but not really knowing. Modernism, Inc. fills in the major gaps. After watching the doc, I asked Cohn to tell me more of the backstory of making this revelatory must-see documentary.
Why did you decide to do a film about Noyes?
In 2012 I released a film about Charles and Ray Eames, and in the process of that I met Eliot’s son, Eli, who is a very creative animator and filmmaker in San Francisco. He told me that the Noyes family was interested in having a similar type of film made about their father. Of course, I knew a bit about Eliot Noyes because he had played such a large role in Charles and Ray’s careers. He was the guy who basically discovered Charles, along with Eero Saarinen, in his role curating industrial design for the Museum of Modern Art, and he commissioned the Eames Office to do some of its most important communications and exhibition work under the aegis of the IBM design program. I also knew that Charles had confided to friends that Noyes was one of the only people he would bother to consult with when he was struggling with a design problem. Charles had very high standards, and that endorsement meant a lot to me.
The first thing I did was read Gordon Bruce’s book (Gordon worked under Eliot for many years and wrote a great book about Eliot Noyes for Phaidon Press), which made a good argument for Eliot’s importance in the development of integral corporate design systems, the type we’re so familiar with today because of Apple. So he was clearly a significant figure in design history, but I still wasn’t sure it was a great story.
And then Eli Noyes shared a movie he had made in 1970 that showed his father being attacked by a new generation of what the Berkeley scholar Greg Castillo calls “Hippie Modernists” at the Aspen design conference. That sealed the deal for me because it provided a really interesting tension to the rest of the story. I started to see Noyes as a guy whose story weaves through the entire history of Modernism in postwar American. That’s when I was sure there was enough meat on the bones to make a good film.
Incidentally, Modernism, Inc. is the perfect title for what Noyes created. I wish I had thought of that for my own book on Midcentury Modernism. This is a silly question, but I don’t suppose you had any direct contact with him?
No, I was 10 years old when he died. And I’ve never worked in design or architecture. I’d be a terrible designer! I’m a journalist who has developed an interest in the field because I feel like it allows me to investigate this important aspect of our lives that’s hidden in plain view. I love contemplating the way our lives are shaped by this accumulation of small decisions that make the built environment. And I’m also really interested in the ethical dimension of it—Good Design is a marketing term but it hints at a deeper impulse shared my many designers to make the world better through this incredible power they have to conceive and shape our physical world. And like all ethics there are lots of gray areas that have to be negotiated. The story of how Modernism was used and coopted by big business in America is one of those gray areas.
The film is quite good in presenting Noyes’ major innovations in organizing industry into what is now called “branding.” Also you capture his singular importance to postwar corporate Modernism. The film shows the warts and all. What was your opinion of Noyes’ work once you assembled the film?
I think it’s a very impressive body of work, and sadly the film has to leave out a ton of it. For example, we hardly touch on the corporate architecture he did. He was involved in literally hundreds of major architectural projects for IBM over the decades. He was the lead architect for some of them, like the landmark Aerospace Building in Los Angeles (it’s now part of the Otis College of Art and Design), and the Design Management Building in Poughkeepsie, which is a very significant building. In other cases, he was working with other architects like Mies van Der Rohe, Eero Saarinen or Skidwell, Owings and Merrill. But in any case, he was deeply involved in establishing the brief and overseeing the development of all the architectural projects from start to finish. There are a lot of things that didn’t fit in the movie for one reason or another. It was a relatively small office that had its hands in an unbelievable quantity of top-flight work.
But I think what set Noyes apart from other designers of his era is the role he played in curating the corporate image, or what he preferred to call “corporate character.” It meant that he wasn’t always the one authoring the designs, but he was the ultimate arbiter of what was good and what represented the values of the companies he worked with. In a time when these ideas of branding and corporate image were not really part of the understanding of what businesses do, he was breaking really important ground. And when you think about what that has meant for the generations of designers who came after him, who now had a template for what a truly integrated design program could bring to the bottom line, he was an enormously influential figure.
You have uncovered some research treasures, including recorded interview with Noyes, home movies and more. Did you have any difficulties obtaining material, or was it easily retrievable?
Archival research is always a struggle. Fortunately the Noyes family had a lot of material but it was in the process of being transferred to Harvard, so it was in a bit of a jumble. I was able to spend a little time digging around before it went through the acquisition process. Gordon Bruce had also pre -4selected hundreds of the best images, which he used in his book, so that saved a lot of effort. And the IBM archivists were enormously helpful. To their credit they are very proud of their design history and they do a great job of helping researchers. In any case, I like to think we found some things that even Gordon Bruce and the Noyes family had never seen.
Paul Rand talked to me about Noyes’ patronage of him, but not to the extent that you got into (e.g., that Noyes had to smooth ruffled feathers of IBM execs owing to Rand’s “my way or the highway” attitude.) In fact, I wondered why you didn’t discuss other corporations that Noyes and Rand worked on, like Cummins and Westinghouse?
As a filmmaker I try to avoid what I think of as lateral storytelling. You’re telling versions of the same story but in a different location or with different characters. Instead of moving the story forward you start moving laterally. I felt like IBM was where he developed his understanding of how to do the corporate work, and by focusing on that we could discover it along with him. Jumping laterally to Westinghouse and Cummins Engine after already telling IBM would have provided some good information but diminishing returns emotionally.
Among the most fascinating parts for me were showing what IBM looked like under Thomas Watson Sr., before Noyes got his hands dirty. Rand often talked about the Queen Ann furniture look, but I’d never seen the actual machines. How did Noyes get to accomplish such transformative work?
It’s very impressive to see how things transformed between the first IBM electric typewriter and the Selectric, for example, in something like a five-year time span. The mainframe computer systems are even more impressive. By the time you get to the revolutionary System/360 in 1964, about 10 years after Noyes took on the design director role at IBM, you see a design program that’s really firing on all cylinders.
To answer your question, my sense is that he did not change things through any kind of authoritarian command structure. Of course, he had the support of IBM’s CEO, Tom Watson Jr., who was his friend from their days working at the Pentagon together during the war, and that obviously helped a lot. But it was not heavy-handed. I don’t think that was in his nature and I don’t think it would have been possible for an outsider to come in yelling and screaming in order to get IBM to change. Instead, he projected a kind of sturdy New England competence that inspired trust. He also had an ability to translate between different types of people. On the one hand you have a guy like Paul Rand, for instance, who was this pugnacious Jewish artist from Brooklyn who had very little patience for anyone who questioned his authority on matters of graphic design. And Eliot Noyes himself was an excellent artist, both as an architect but also as a painter. Before switching to architecture at Harvard he had wanted to be a fine artist. So Noyes could relate to a guy like Rand. And then, on the other hand, you had legions of engineers, salesmen, middle managers and executives who made up the majority of IBM employees. And Noyes’ role was to get them all on the same page. You couldn’t do that by stamping your feet and insulting people. It was more a kind of code-switching, I imagine that allowed him to speak the right language for the right audience and get them to see the value of what he was trying to do for the company.
I also think that success in business gives a person authority. And he made some smart decisions by, for instance, focusing on some of the low-hanging fruit before tackling the thornier problems. The first thing he did was hire Paul Rand to remake the IBM logotype and institute a unified graphics protocol. You could make an impact by reforming graphics without having to dig into the engineering of products, so you can do that relatively quickly. The Selectric typewriter was another example of a very successful product with a very fresh design appeal that made a lot of money for IBM and proved the point that the Noyes approach to design was good for IBM. At some point he probably stopped having to repeat the argument that “good design is good business,” because everyone had seen it at work. It became part of the DNA of the company.
Noyes was a capitalist white knight, just like the Streamline industrial designers of the ’20s and ’30s. Do you think American industry would be the same without him?
There was nothing like a comprehensive corporate design program that integrated everything from graphics to communications to product design and architecture prior to Eliot Noyes. At least in America. You had Olivetti and some others in Europe but they were much smaller companies. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t have happened without him. I think he had a knack for being the right person in the right place at the right time. He was obviously a gifted designer with a brilliant eye for talent and great communication skills. So all that helped him, but I also suspect that some of these ideas were in the air and it was probably only a matter of time before someone else attempted to do something along the lines of what Noyes accomplished with IBM and some other companies. In that sense one of the things that really differentiates him from other designers was the relationship he had with the CEO of IBM, Tom Watson Jr., because that gave him the power to assume a kind of responsibility that would not have been otherwise possible for a designer at a company on that scale. But I do think Noyes deserves the accolades because the quality of what he did really stands the test of time.
What do you want the viewer to take away from this film?
I’d like for Eliot Noyes to emerge out of the shadow of some of the other Midcentury design giants like Charles Eames, George Nelson and Eero Saarinen. He was not much of a self-promoter, and in fact a lot of his success was due to the fact that he empowered other designers to do great things and let them enjoy the credit. But he deserves to be discussed in the same conversation as those guys, and not just because he hired all of them!
I think you’ve succeeded in casting a revealing spotlight on his integral role. You’ve also posed some interesting questions about the ideals of Modernism and the business of good design.
I’d also like the viewer to think a little bit about the fate of Modernism as a movement. Eliot Noyes started out as a disciple of Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus, which was a specific flavor of Modernism that developed in Europe between the wars. There was a kind of idealism—a social reform aspect—to it. Modern design promised to improve people’s lives in tangible ways by making high-quality goods and housing affordable for everyone. Once Modernism became installed in America after WWII, however, it lost a lot of that idealism. It was adopted by multinational corporations like IBM and it became the preferred architectural style of the super-rich. I don’t think Eliot Noyes was consciously trying to make this happen, but he was probably as central to this evolution as anyone. I try to let viewers make up their own minds about whether Eliot Noyes made the world better or worse as a result of the work he did in corporate design, but I hope they at least think about what might have happened if Modernism maintained the more independent spirit that it had before if became “Modernism, Inc.”
