Retrospective: Eliot Noyes

Few designers better symbolise the point of cross-over between the calm, rational modernism of pipe-smoking, collarless-shirted Europe and the cigar-chomping, thrusting industrialists in the USA, than Eliot Noyes.

Born in 1910, Noyes came of age as modernism peaked; he worked with both Gropius and Breuer before being appointed the very first director of MoMA’s Industrial Design department. The post served as an ideal springboard from which to create a new form of corporate design, and IBM was Noyes’s best-known success story, a company shaped in his vision, from letterheads to typewriters.

This new monograph – the first major book on Noyes’ work – is a comprehensive retrospective of his work, from petrol pumps to pavilions, his own house in New Canaan, Connecticut, a modest modernist masterpiece, as well as a huge amount of unpublished material.

12 February 2007 | Art