Frankly, the whippoorwills around the Rantoul house on Martha’s Vineyard can get annoying, singing through the night into dawn. They’ve nested beside a modest trio of wooden boxes rising out of a canopy of trees overlooking the sea. The largest box in the center contains living, dining, and kitchen areas. Bookending it, two smaller boxes contain bedrooms and baths. The long flanks of each rectangle are lined with floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors; uninsulated wood and cinderblocks form the ends. Threaded to the eaves on slim cables, a wooden deck wraps the house without obstructing views. Two-by-fours framing the walls serve, on the interior, as shelves, bearing old Kodak snapshots and Milton Avery–like canvasses beside kids’ crayon drawings. The gossamer skin of this summerhouse allows views, sound, light, and air to suffuse the interior. “My favorite aspect of the house is that it invites the outside in—in all weather and conditions. It places you in the environment, not cut off from it,” says Neal Rantoul, whose parents commissioned the house from architect Eliot Noyes in 1963. “I also love the openness, the way it forces you to live together in the common room.” Diana Harrison, one of the two sisters with whom Rantoul now shares it, agrees: “We’ve gotten closer to each other because of the house.”
All of Noyes’s summerhouses were unpretentious (exposed wood, screen doors, no insulation, shed roofs), though formally sophisticated, affairs. “There was a gaiety to it,” says industrial designer Gordon Bruce, who first joined Noyes’s studio as an intern in 1968 and has now written the architect’s first monograph published last year by Phaidon Press, “but there was a lot of restraint. He respected the site and the needs of the people so he didn’t build the Taj Mahal on Martha’s Vineyard.” Like the Rantoul house, other Noyes houses used the parallel walls and embrace of the outdoors. Noyes’s own New Canaan, Connecticut, house consisted of public and private rectangles separated by an open court. The public side had no walls but contained zones carefully defined by materials. Noyes required guests to cross through the open air to reach the bathrooms on the private side, placing nature at the heart of the dwelling. (Friend and graphic designer Paul Rand once gave him the money to install a toilet in the living room; Noyes bought a dogwood tree instead.) For the Graham house in Greenwich, Connecticut, Noyes moved the parallel stone walls close together. Instead of framing the interior space, they formed a “street” bisecting the house through which occupants could access rooms that cantilevered off them. “My father believed firmly that buildings are practical, enhancing the lives of the people who use them, not objects of reverence,” says Noyes’s youngest son, Fred, who also became an architect.
In 1940, Noyes was hired as the first industrial design director of the New York Museum of Modern Art. At MoMA, Noyes established the yearly “Useful Objects” show (recently revived by curator Paola Antonelli). To “curate” it and spur Christmas consumerism, he and wife, Molly, mined the local five-and-dime for ordinary items under ten dollars. He initiated educational programs for children and competitions for everything from fabric to furniture design. Noyes used the museum as a platform to educate the American public about design, in general, and about the Bauhaus philosophy, in particular.
In 1956, drawing on his panoply of skills, IBM hired Noyes as their Consultant Director of Design, making him the ultimate arbiter in the company’s commission of interiors and industrial design, architecture, exhibits, graphics, packaging, and art acquisition around the world. It was Noyes who hired architects Eero Saarinen, Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, and Paul Rudolph, and who decorated their buildings with artworks by the likes of Ivan Chermayeff, Alexander Calder, and Isamu Noguchi. Noyes also designed a number of IBM projects, including the colorful Selectric typewriter, and established design reviews of the latest products in a bare white room to cultivate consistency—not uniformity—throughout the company. Finally, he generated brand manuals to maintain this consistency. Noyes would eventually consult for Westinghouse, Mobil Oil, and Cummins Engine Co., as well, and the same formula worked for each. For Mobil, in 1964, he designed its distinctive service stations, equipment, and corporate design program. With 50,000 stations around the world, the identity had to translate from Indiana to Kuala Lumpur to Dubai. “He educated corporate America about why design is important,” says Bruce, “and why it makes good business sense.” Anticipating the magnitude of brand power in the mid-1990s, Noyes became a “curator of corporate character.”
The eternal teacher—of corporations, students, and the public—Noyes mastered the art of making his message meaningful to diverse audiences. “The thing I’d take away from him,” says Bruce, “is the big-picture thinking, seeing the interconnectedness through all the complexity and the consistency between the smallest and biggest things he did.” Fred Noyes agrees that his father’s architecture was based not on fancy details or complex geo-metries but on clear ideas—and that this way of seeing the world suffused his life. “He was, first and foremost, an architect,” says Fred, “but he brought that discipline to many fields and, in that sense, spread the power of design to places where it hadn’t been recognized yet.”
2 / 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.
3 / 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.
4 / 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.
5 / 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.
6 / 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.
7 / 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.
8 / 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.”
9 / Solar control fascinated Noyes and his textural (and economical) experiments perforating and screening building façades originated with partitions he saw in India.
10 / In 1977, Noyes died of a heart attack at the age of 66.
