The white room: Eliot Noyes and the logic of the information age interior

Grey Room

Volumn , Issue 12, 2003, Pages 7-31

  Harwood, John ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 35548982453     PISSN: 15263819     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/152638103322446451     Document Type: Review

References (32)

1. Eliot F. Noyes, Organic Design in Home Furnishings (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1941). The emphases of Noyes's architectural education at Harvard under Gropius and Breuer are evident throughout the book, particularly in the history of modern furniture design offered at the beginning, in which the importance of Breuer's innovations in tubular steel furniture and in modular furniture (Typenmöbel) is heavily stressed (4-9). Also, more than half the bibliography (45-46) is given over to German works on aesthetics and architectural theory and history; most of the remainder are works by British authors, again echoing Gropius's and Breuer's trajectory on their way to the United States
2. Noyes, Organic Design, n.p. The quotations are taken from Lewis Mumford, "The Assimilation of the Machine," in Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1934), ch. 7. The final three subheadings of the chapter from which the quotations are taken are "The Growth of Functionalism," "The Simplification of the Environment," and "The Objective Personality," three themes that seem to have motivated much of Noyes's subsequent work. This is also the part of Mumford's book in which he most clearly enunciates his theory of a newly emerging, and inherently complex, mechanical and informational environment: "we need to guard ourselves against the fatigue of dealing with too many objects or being stimulated unnecessarily by their presence, as we perform the numerous offices they impose. Hence a simplification of the externals of the mechanical world is almost a prerequisite for dealing with its internal complications. To reduce the constant succession of stimuli, the environment itself must be made as neutral as possible" (357). It is thus the role of the designer to effect this "simplification," in effect to generate a counter-environment at the level of the outside ("the externals") of the machine
3. The label "ergonomics" was applied only in the mid-1960s as an umbrella term for a wide range of scientific practices concerning the relationship between machines and the human body, including anthropometrics and "human engineering." For the first authoritative contemporary overview of the subject, see K.F.H. Murrell, Ergonomics (London: Chapman and Hall, 1965)
4. Watson and Petre, 259
5. This staged transparency was echoed in Noyes's industrial designs for IBM's computers as well. The RAMAC computer, unveiled in 1956, featured a clear glass panel that revealed the brightly colored moving parts of the computer's exciting new feature, "random-access memory." See Arthur Gregor, "Ramac: An IBM Case Study; IBM Develops Its Random-Access Memory Accounting Machine," Industrial Design 4, no. 3 (March 1957): 54-57
6. From Thomas J. Watson Jr., in A Business and Its Beliefs: The Ideas That Helped Build IBM, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), 59-60
7. Quoted in Scott Kelly, "Curator of corporate character ... Eliot Noyes and Associates," Industrial Design 13, no. 5 (June 1966): 43; emphasis added
8. Hugh B. Johnston, "From Old IBM to New IBM," Industrial Design 4, no. 3 (March 1957): 48-53; emphasis added
9. Eliot Noyes, "A Sign Study for IBM," Architectural Record 127, no. 7 (June 1960): 150-164
10. Johnston, 51
11. For a more developed theoretical investigation of the relationship between the design of IBM's computers and its buildings, see Reinhold Martin, "Computer Architectures: Saarinen's Patterns, IBM's Brains," in Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture, ed. Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Réjean Legault (Montreal and Cambridge: Canadian Centre for Architecture and MIT Press, 2000), 141-164
12. For an account of IBM's expansion in these years, see Henry Bakis, I.B.M.: Une multinationale régionale (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1977)
13. Pugh, Building IBM; and Sobel
14. For broad overviews of the various IBM commissions in these years, see "IBM's New Corporate Face," Architectural Forum 106 (February 1957): 106-114
15. Paul R. Damaz, "Les Constructions I.B.M.," Architecture d'aujourd'hui 34 (December 1963-January 1964): 40-50
16. and John Morris Dixon, "I.B.M. Thinks Twice," Architectural Forum 124, no. 2 (March 1966): 32-39
17. The term "counterenvironment" is also McLuhan's, first deployed in his essay "The Invisible Environment: The Future of an Erosion," Perspecta 11 (1967): 164-167
18. A house type developed by modernist architects during and shortly after World War II, perhaps most notably by Marcel Breuer, in which the plan was divided into two wings, distinct in function, connected by an entrance, walkway, or carport. Noyes had designed just such a house in conjunction with Breuer, the Kniffin House (1949) in New Canaan, Connecticut. See "Sloping Site for House Facilitates Zoned Plan," Architectural Record 114 (September 1953): 159-163
19. "Clarity, Cohesiveness, Good Detail; IBM Education Center, Poughkeepsie, New York," Architectural Record 126 (September 1959): 199-204
20. Noyes's second house in New Canaan is probably his most famous architectural work. It was published repeatedly in the architectural and popular press, winning praise for its powerfully simple integration of a binuclear plan into a single, enclosed volume; see, for example, "House, New Canaan, Connecticut," Progressive Architecture 35 (January 1954): 122
21. "House: New Canaan, Connecticut," Progressive Architecture 37 (December 1956): 98-105
22. John Peter, "The New Early American Look in Home Living," Look 20, no. 8 (17 April 1956): 72-73
23. On IBM's exhibition designs, see James H. Carmel, Exhibition Techniques, Traveling and Temporary (New York: Reinhold, 1962), 62-63, 111, 164-168
24. Karl Kaspar, International Shop Design (London: Thames and Hudson, 1967), 74-77
25. See Eliot Noyes, "A Continuing Study of the Window Wall by Eliot Noyes," Architectural Record 141, no. 4 (April 1967): 173-180
26. and Francis Bello, "The War of the Computers," Fortune 59 (October 1959), pp. 128-132, 160, 164, 166, 171
27. Dixon, 36
28. Gyorgy Kepes, ed., The Man-Made Object (New York: George Braziller, 1966)
29. For a detailed history of the development of the SAGE computer systems, especially in regard to their use of magnetic memory cores, see Emerson W. Pugh, Memories That Shaped an Industry: Decisions Leading to IBM System/360 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984), esp. ch. 4
30. On the importance of parallel processing for the real-time coordination of information from radar, see John F. Jacobs, "History of the Design of the SAGE Computer - The AN/FSQ-7," Annals of the History of Computing 5, no. 4 (October 1983): 340-349
31. Paul Virilio, Popular Defense & Ecological Struggles (New York: Semiotext(e), 1990): 15; emphasis in original
32. Though images and accounts of top-secret NORAD bunkers are in short supply, it is known that the SAGE system was divided into twenty-three sectors (twenty-two in the United States and one in Canada), each with its own "direction centers," plus one central direction center at NORAD in Colorado. For a personal account of a visit to one such NORAD SAGE installation, buried 600 feet underground in North Bay, Ontario, see Henry S. Tropp, "SAGE at North Bay," Annals of the History of Computing 5, no. 4 (October 1983): 401-403