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5 Eliot Noyes and Associates. Westinghouse Tele-Computer Eliot Noyes and Associates. Westinghouse Tele-Computer Center, near Pittsburgh, 1964. 5 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638103322446451 by guest on 27 September 2021 Top: Eliot Noyes and Associates. Westinghouse Tele-Computer Center, near Pittsburgh, 1964. Plan. Bottom: Eliot Noyes and Associates. Tele-Computer Center, 1964. Interior. 6 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638103322446451 by guest on 27 September 2021 The White Room: Eliot Noyes and the Logic of the Information Age Interior JOHN HARWOOD In a 1965 essay entitled “‘On Line’ in ‘Real Time,’” the editors of Fortune magazine described the advent of a new technological order that had already dramatically altered military planning and organization and would now impose itself upon business—the arrival of computer processing and management in “real time.” Members of Westinghouse Electric Corporation’s executive committee recently filed into a small room in the company’s new Tele-Computer Center near Pittsburgh and prepared to look at their business as no group of executives had ever looked at business before. In front of them was a large video screen, and to one side of the screen was a “remote inquiry” device that seemed a cross between a typewriter and a calculator. As the lights dimmed, the screen lit up with current reports from many of the company’s important divisions—news of gross sales, orders, profitability, inventory levels, manufacturing costs, and various measures of perfor- mance based on such data. When the officers asked the remote-inquiry device for additional information or calculations, distant computers shot back the answers in seconds.1 In 1964 the architect, industrial designer, and “curator of corporate character” Eliot Noyes (1910–1977) was the first to confront the problem of designing a building for corporate activity that was “on line” in “real time.” The result was a near-opaque exterior of tinted glass walls accentuated by laminated white quartz panels, enveloping a maximally open interior of partition walls orga- nized around a central, glass-walled room filled with computers and their bustling attendants. If this is the architecture of real-time management, how are we to understand it? It is in investigating this enclosed central space, the site of the dynamic inter- face between humans and machines engaged in the synchronic real-time man- agement of spaces or fields outside, that the architectural logic linking and organizing the corporate body, computers, and design unfolds. It is this logic— Grey Room 12, Summer 2003, pp. 5–31. © 2003 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 7 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638103322446451 by guest on 27 September 2021 that of a counterenvironment generated from the demands of machines upon human bodies and vice versa—that pushes architecture toward an increasing closure and blankness, toward architecture’s limit case. Aspects of Noyes’s own career, leading up to his work for Westinghouse, and beyond, offer a virtual cross-section of this encounter between humans and machines—an encounter played out behind the designed surfaces of corporate buildings and computers. | | | | | Noyes’s first contact with the corporation coincides exactly with his first efforts at negotiating the interface between human and machine. In 1940, probably due to the widespread influence of his mentor Walter Gropius, he became the first curator of the new Industrial Design Department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. That year Noyes organized and presided over the famous com- petitive exhibition Organic Design in Home Furnishings and published a polem- ical catalogue of the same title documenting the results. On the inside cover of the catalogue Noyes set the terms of the competition with his definition of “Organic Design”: A design may be called organic when there is an harmonious organization of the parts within the whole, according to structure, material, and purpose. Within this definition there can be no vain ornamentation or superfluity, but the part of beauty is none the less great—in ideal choice of material, in visual refinement, and in the rational elegance of things intended for use.2 This last statement is telling, because the competition was as much a business deal as a museum exhibit; each of the winning designers was awarded a production and distribution contract with a major American department store. The overwhelming winner of the competition was the team of Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames, taking the two most important categories—living room and chair design—with their innovative method of “anthropomorphically” bending plywood. Noyes defined design, albeit implicitly, as a matter of teamwork.3 The exhi- bition was itself a collaboration between museum, designers, and corporations, and all of the winners of the competition, with the exception of textile design- ers, were teams of two or more designers.4 More important, Noyes stressed in Organic Design not only the role of the machine in design and production but its formative impact on society as well. Also on the inside cover, alongside his own definition of “organic design,” Noyes included two quotations from Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization: 8 Grey Room 12 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638103322446451 by guest on 27 September 2021 Our capacity to go beyond the machine rests in our power to assimilate the machine. Until we have absorbed the lessons of objectivity, impersonality, neutrality, the lessons of the mechanical realm, we cannot go further in our development toward the more richly organic, the more profoundly human. The economic: the objective: and finally the integration of these principles in a new conception of the organic—these are the marks, already discernible, of our assimilation of the machine not merely as an instrument of action but as a valuable mode of life.5 Here was the central problem of design, as Noyes saw it in 1940. The chair, and the living room, were points of interface between the human and the machine. The success of that interaction hinged on the development of a newly “organic”—that is, newly organized—environment, and demanded the study of the boundary between human and machine (to be defined later as ergonomics).6 Thus the appeal of Saarinen and Eames’s designs, which expressively mapped the form of the human body onto machine-made furniture and integrated these new forms into the bright white rooms of the modern home. It was these pre- liminary efforts at achieving a synthetic and social approach to the mechanical and the natural—that is, of navigating the liminal territory of the ergonomic— that Noyes brought to bear in his work at IBM. Noyes’s career at MoMA was soon interrupted—though one might also say accelerated—by World War II. Because of his experience flying gliders, he was recruited as a test pilot in the army–air force glider research program.7 At the Pentagon, Noyes’s neighbor down the hall was Thomas Watson Jr., a reconnais- sance pilot and future heir of the International Business Machines (IBM) Corporation. The two became friends after Noyes gave Watson lessons on how to fly gliders. After the war Noyes returned to New York and MoMA and also took a partnership in the offices of the aging Norman Bel Geddes; Watson returned to IBM as executive vice president. Through their friendship Noyes won a series of commissions from IBM for the Geddes office, most notably redesigning the IBM 562 typewriter, transforming it into the sleek “Executive” model. The smooth curves of its plastic casing, as well as the buttons of the keyboard, redesigned to better fit the hand and fingers, became standard features in American typewriter design. This initial suc- cess led to further com- missions from IBM, and on the closure of the Geddes office in 1947 Opposite: Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen. “Living Room” Chairs. Published in Organic Design in Home Furnishings, 1940. Right: IBM Executive Typewriters, 1959. Harwood | The White Room 9 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638103322446451 by guest on 27 September 2021 Noyes opened his own architectural and industrial design office in New York, attaching it to the architectural office of his friend and former teacher at Harvard, Marcel Breuer, with whom he collaborated on several occasions throughout his career.8 By 1950 Noyes’s practice was self-sufficient enough for him to move his office to New Canaan. The same year he accepted his first architectural-scale project for IBM, redesigning Watson’s office on the sixteenth floor of IBM World Headquarters in New York. Noyes stripped away the walnut panels and heavy curtains, replacing them with large sheer planes of color, and installing works of modern art throughout. The floor was jokingly referred to by the employees as “the rainbow room”; however, Noyes’s modernizing also clearly impressed. | | | | | In the early 1950s Thomas Watson Jr., about to take over the presidency and chairmanship from his father Thomas Watson Sr., made a series of momentous decisions regarding the future of IBM.9 Following an emerging trend in man- agement—reflected most famously in the reorganization strategies of General Electric and the U.S. government under Eisenhower—Watson determined to abandon IBM’s pyramidal managerial hierarchy in favor of a more efficient, “horizontal” structure. Thus, when he came to power in 1952, he began the process of reshuffling IBM’s various activities into a series of more or less autonomous divisions, coordinated by a corporate managerial staff. In the same years Watson made a commitment to move the bulk of IBM’s mas- sive resources into the research, development, and marketing of computers. Watson Sr.
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