Modernism: The Eliot Noyes Design Story (9/10)

by Tony Medley

78 Minutes.

This is an intriguing documentary about a little-known designer and architect who had a huge impact on all our lives, Eliot Noyes. Written and directed by Jason Cohn, the story is told through narration (Sebastian Roché) and interviews with many people, including Eliot himself, Katrina Alcorn, Head of Design, IBM, his sons Eli and Fred Noyes, and daughter Derry Noyes, and various other colleagues and commentators.

Walter Gropius, head of Harvard School of Design, taught Noyes to see the continuity between art, architecture, and the design of everyday objects. Noyes brought this to New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) where he was hired at age 29 as the museum’s first director of industrial design. Said John Harwood, University of Toronto ”(at MoMA) He wanted to transform all the products in the home to make them more practical, more beautiful, simply better.”

He was instrumental in designing chairs to replace upholstered chairs with more practical, simpler chairs. Some, like me, might say that this was not progress. The chairs shown might be functional, but they are, in a word, ugly compared to upholstered chairs.

He was in the Army during WWII. Tom Hardy, IBM Design Manager 1970-92, says, “His job in the Pentagon was to convince the military leadership that gliders could be very important to military operations.” Noyes wrote to Milton Caniff, the illustrator for the hugely popular comic strip “Terry and the Pirates,” to ask him to write a story about this new aircraft type because all the Pentagon military men read the strip. So Caniff did, and the Pentagon decision-makers came to Noyes and asked him, “Can we do this?” The answer was yes. They did it in Burma, which was so successful that Ike used gliders for the Normandy Invasion.

While in the Army he taught soldiers how to fly gliders. Later, after the war, he discovered that one of the soldiers he taught was Tom Watson, Jr., the son of the founder of IBM, who eventually took over as CEO of IBM. Noyes later became the chief designer for IBM and was instrumental in many of IBM’s achievements, including redesigning the logo and the Selectric typewriter, the biggest-selling typewriter of all time.

Later in life, Noyes designed several unique houses and did ground-breaking work on the emblem for Mobil Gas and the gas dispensers, both of which were beautiful and unique.

Tony Medley is a columnist, and MPAA-accredited film critic His reviews are published in The Larchmont Chronicle, Telicom Magazine, The Tolucan Times, CWEB.com, on Rottentomatoes.com, the Movie Review Query Engine, and at www.tonymedley.com. Tony Medley holds the rank of Silver life Master, is an American Contract Bridge League Club Director, and has won regional and sectional titles. An attorney, he received his B.S. from UCLA, where he was sports editor of UCLA’s Daily Bruin, and his J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law.

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