VIFF Review: Modernism, Inc.

Noyes was most influential with his design work at IBM

Eliot Noyes was an American architect and industrial designer who promoted the importance of branding for a company, and how form and function were critical. "We think good design is good business," he used to say, and he proved it with his work for such clients as IBM and Mobil.

The documentary Modernism, Inc. profiles Noyes, as for most people who are not in the design world probably have never heard of him.

Noyes was very prolific. At the age of 29 he was already the director of the Industrial Design department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. One exhibition he showed the chair of the 19th century, stripping it to show off how much extraneous material these chairs had, from stuffing to fabric, and cushioning. He contrasted it with modern chairs that had simple lines and bright colours.

His design of the IBM Selectric typewriter

He was also very clever. During World War II Noyes set up a program to look into the potential uses of gliders, but the generals didn't seem interested in these planes that had no fire power. Then he noticed all the secretaries would read a military-themed comic strip in the newspaper everyday and sent a letter to the cartoonist about adding a storyline about gliders.

Soon after these comic strips were published, the generals took an interest in what Noyes was doing.

Noyes married another architect though she never practiced, and they moved their family to New Cannan, Connecticut. There he designed their home which had floor-to-ceiling windows with a courtyard in the middle; it meant that if they wanted to move from one room to another they would have to go outside, but the children in the film said this never bothered them.

The children were also brought up in a traditional sense, learning classical music and reading books, playing in nature.

Meanwhile a pilot Noyes knew in the air force was Thomas J Watson Jr, the son of the founder of International Business Machines, or IBM. As Watson Jr was poised to take over his father's business that started in 1911, Noyes advised him on creating a new standard look of the company, from the letterhead to the look of the products and even the architecture of the IBM buildings.

The Noyes' home in New Cannan

For this he got such designers as Paul Rand, Charles Eames, and architects like Mies van de Rohe, Eero Saarinen, and Marco Zanuso to work with IBM.

Noyes' most famous design for the company was the IBM Selectric typewriter, which used a typeball instead of a "basket" of individual keys, while the design of the typewriter itself was sleek and modern. He realised that with computers, the parts that people don't need to understand how they work don't need to be seen; only design how it needs to be used.

Modernism, Inc. takes a sharp turn that led to Noyes' fall from the pedestal, but for his children, it was an opportunity to get to know their father better as a person, which son Eli says in the film [he died in March 2024 at the age of 81]. 

He recalls flying in -- what else -- gliders with his dad and they had a great time, but soon after that his father had cancer and died.

Nevertheless, Noyes is perhaps the father of branding in the United States, giving us the language and template to follow that have been tried and tested. Apple, the film points out, has followed Noyes' philosophy of form and function. 

Modernism, Inc.

Directed by Jason Cohn

79 minutes

2023