about
Part of the raft of Harvard-trained mid-century American designers, Eliot Noyes (1910-1977) is most notable for his work in corporate America. His clients included IBM, Mobil Oil and institutions like the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and if any one person can be said to have laid the groundwork for American corporations's adoption of the International Style, it's Noyes. A member of the Harvard Five, Harvard-educated architects and designers who lived and worked in New Canaan, Connecticut like Marcel Breuer, Philip Johnson and others, Noyes was an early champion of the work of Charles and Ray Eames and Eero Saarinen. One of his biggest projects was the IBM Selectric typewriter, and worked designing buildings for IBM, advising the company on design and work-flow and engaging architects like Saarinen, Breuer, and Mies Van der Rohe do design their buildings around the world.
Things to Know
- Just for kicks, Noyes read the classics in Greek. Despite his highbrow education, he wasn’t a pretentious speaker. Frustrated with IBM employee jargon, Noyes composed his “Dear Mother” pamphlet, suggesting memos be written like a simple note to Mum.
- Noyes imposed limits to define tasks. He once began a meeting by saying, “The objective of this meeting is to be done by lunchtime.” No one got to the deli late.
- As an undergrad, Noyes wanted to be a painter and served as the illustrations editor at the Harvard Lampoon. Having switched to architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, he would have attended the Bauhaus had Hitler not closed it in 1933.
- One Thursday during graduate school, Noyes was invited to join an archaeological expedition to the Persian Persepolis as a watercolorist. By the following Monday, he had packed his accordion and skis and deferred his degree for two years to embark on the seven-week steam passage to Beirut.
- When Noyes returned to Harvard, he found Bauhaus professors Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer teaching. After graduating, he joined their firm briefly. His brand of functional modernism followed Bauhaus tenets and was influenced by Le Corbusier.
- After Noyes established his own studio in New Canaan in 1947, he drew four of his colleagues—John Johansen, Marcel Breuer, Philip Johnson, and Landis Gores—to the city where, in their persistent efforts to introduce modernism to the bucolic “train station next to heaven,” they became known as the Harvard Five.
- Noyes may have been the first to design a pass-through between kitchen and dining rooms. As wives began to do their own cooking and serving, he responded to the need to pass easily between rooms while entertaining.
- Noyes insisted that design and commerce work together—and that styling had nothing to do with either. One of his most popular The Shape of Things columns for Consumer Reports magazine criticized the rampant overdesign in Detroit where he felt execs were “playing rocket ship.”
- Solar control fascinated Noyes and his textural (and economical) experiments perforating and screening building façades originated with partitions he saw in India.
- In 1977, Noyes died of a heart attack at the age of 66.
