Eliot Noyes and Associates. Westinghouse Tele-Computer Center, near Pittsburgh, 1964.

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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.

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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 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.

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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 , he became the first curator of the new Industrial Design Department at the 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 and , 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:

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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 ; 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.

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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, , 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.

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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. had always considered IBM’s work in computers before and during WWII largely a matter of prestige rather than of business. The production of computers had been a means to preserve working relationships with both uni- versities and the U.S. government, bringing in increasingly large amounts of money in the way of research grants but relatively little sales revenue. Watson Jr. saw things differently. In order to win and maintain the numerous newly emerging and lucrative contracts from the U.S. military, with an eye to a prospective market for computers in the world of corporate business, and in competitive response to recent successes of the Remington Rand UNIVAC com- puter in the business market, Watson determined that IBM should, by the end of the 1950s, corner the entire computer market. These two fundamental shifts in the structure and orientation of IBM were accompanied by a third change: Watson determined that IBM should adopt a “new look.” Following a chance encounter with the sleek modern design of

Eliot Noyes. IBM Showroom, New York, 1954.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638103322446451 by guest on 27 September 2021 Olivetti’s Manhattan showroom and advertisements,10 Watson hired Noyes to redesign the IBM lobby and showroom in its corporate headquarters in Manhattan, on the corner of 57th Street and Madison Avenue. The space was unveiled at the premiere of the new IBM 702 computer, the announcement of which was to cement IBM’s commitment to business computing and almost prophetically signaled IBM’s dominance of the market for the next thirty-five years. Watson described the appearance of the original lobby in his autobiography: Dad [Thomas Watson Sr.] had decorated it to suit his taste, and it was like the first-class salon on an ocean liner. It had the Oriental rugs he loved and black marble pillars trimmed with gold leaf. Lining the walls were punch- card machines and time clocks on display, cordoned off by velvet ropes hooked to burnished brass posts.11 Noyes completely redecorated. The new floor was white, the walls painted red, the marble pillars covered over with smooth panels, and small silver signs read- ing “IBM 702” in a sans serif font on the walls. Perhaps the most significant change was the way in which the computers were displayed. As Watson relates: The Data Processing Center generated enormous excitement. Like the SSEC and the 701 that had preceded it in the window, the 702 was actu- ally a working machine. Customers who wanted to rent computer time would simply bring their data in, and we kept the computer running around the clock. If you went by on Madison Avenue in the middle of the night you would see it behind the big plate-glass windows, tended by well- dressed technicians in its brightly lit room.12 Thus, Noyes’s redecoration was not only an interior design, but an exhibition staged in a shop window as well. Noyes and IBM were concerned at the outset with projecting an image of IBM as a provider of an essentially modern ser- vice—the handling of information. Interestingly, this was achieved by a staged transparency that allowed a glimpse into an interior space—from outside to inside.13 This interior was specially designed to highlight the ergonomically sound relationship between the computer and its operators, processes that occurred in a space entirely independent of the exter- nal environment: “brightly lit,” “in the middle of the night,” “around the clock.” Following the popular success of this design (and

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638103322446451 by guest on 27 September 2021 IBM’s financial successes in marketing computers), Watson offered Noyes a job as the director of design at IBM in February 1956. Noyes turned him down, say- ing: “I’ll work with you, not for you. The only way I can do this job right is to have full access to top management.”14 Watson was convinced and Noyes thus accepted a position as “Consultant Director of Design,” pledging a major por- tion of his time to IBM while retaining his own private practice. By remaining outside of the corporation, and thus outside of its hierarchies and autonomous divisions, Noyes was considered more able to transform IBM on a structural level by linking its products, spaces, and managerial processes through design. He was to coordinate the redesign of the entire environment of IBM on a tele- scoping scale—from stationery and curtains, to products such as typewriters and computers, to laboratory and administration buildings. According to both Watson and Noyes, redesigning the look of IBM was essential to the way it func- tioned. As Watson related in a 1963 lecture at Columbia University—signifi- cantly titled “The New Environment”—on the various techniques IBM used to restructure its management system and employee policies during the period: With all of these innovations we have introduced in company communi- cation, the principal lesson we have learned, I believe, is that you must make use of a number of pipelines, upward as well as downward. Parallel communication paths may seem unnecessary to some. But we have found that any single path can be only partly successful, that certain information flows better over some paths than others, and that all employees do not react in the same way to a given medium. Management must have a wide selection of communication means at its disposal.15 Viewed as technique of communication, design was to be one of what Watson called “parallel communication paths.” It was to be integrated into the dynamics of management so thoroughly that it could literally be considered a defining characteristic: management, as a process of communication, was to be inseparable from its environment. Rather than develop a recognizable “IBM style,” Noyes argued to Watson, the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638103322446451 by guest on 27 September 2021 theme of IBM’s design program should “be simply the best in modern design.”16 In keeping with Watson’s reorganization of the managerial hierarchy of IBM, graphic, product, and architectural designs could retain a certain autonomy from one another in formal terms, but they would nonetheless be united by man- agerial oversight and a set of guiding principles—in short, by a systemic flexi- bility. Watson appointed an IBM sales executive, Gordon Smith, to the newly created position of “Director of Communications.” Smith, in addition to coordinating the efforts of Noyes’s office and those of IBM’s own in-house Design Department, would also be in charge of advancing the program through- out the corporation. The process of communication and management through design was made redundant, as information flowed along “parallel communi- cation paths.” On the design end, too, Noyes did not go it alone. In addition to working alongside the IBM Design Department, he assembled and directed a team of fellow consultants—the graphic designer Paul Rand, the designer and critic , the multitalented Charles and Ray Eames, and the historian and critic Edgar Kaufmann—and hired a host of high- and low-profile architects to tackle the problem of housing IBM’s massive expansion in the late 1950s and 1960s. Thus, one might say, Noyes managed, perhaps as much as he designed, the new look of IBM. The synchronization of management and design was carried even further in Noyes’s assessment of what he called IBM’s “corporate character.” IBM was not simply a maker of business machines, Noyes reasoned in a 1966 interview; rather, it was in the business of controlling, organizing, and redistributing infor- mation. This Noyes recognized as a matter of environmental control: “if you get to the very heart of the matter, what IBM really does is to help man extend his control over his environment. . . . I think that’s the meaning of the company.”17 The control of information in space and the design of the corporate environment were opposite sides of the same coin: the designer’s role within the context of the corporation was to house it, organize it, and prevent its dissipation as its control functions extended themselves into the wider environment. This program, Watson, Noyes, and Smith recognized, could not be applied from the top down. “The way to make it effective,” Smith and Noyes explained in a 1957 interview, is not to send down a weighty memo from above, but to kindle sponta- neous enthusiasm with a succession of good works. . . . And this will happen only when good design—the awareness of it and the desire for it—begins to come out through their own skins. That is why this is not an outside

Charles and Ray Eames. Schematic diagram of a general communication system (after Warren Weaver), 1968.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638103322446451 by guest on 27 September 2021 movement. We are trying to start one within the company, using a variety of stimuli.18

Teamwork and horizontality thus not only characterized the management network, they characterized the intentions of the design program as well: design was a means of re-forming the corporate body, literally at the level of the indi- vidual member, from the inside out. Emerging from under the “gray flannel suit,” the design signal—communicating the organized unity of the corporate body, its spaces, and its machines—was to be borne along “parallel communi- cation paths” with ultimate redundancy by the “awareness” and “desire” of every IBM engineer, salesperson, and manager. Noyes’s first move as consultant director was to commission his fellow design consultant Paul Rand to furnish IBM with a new logo and to coordinate the application of this new standard throughout the company. This was done in conjunction with a study of corporate signage, a summary of which Noyes subsequently published in 1960, aimed at developing a universal system of signage for all IBM facilities. Among the many conclusions Noyes draws in the study concerning the deployment of signage, two are paramount: one, that the ultimate criterion for measuring the effectiveness of a sign is “clarity of mes- sage”; and two, that architects should “consider the IBM sign as part of the building, and to incorporate it in the design.”19 Thus the IBM logo was a defining characteristic of the new managerial environment; it would provide the consis- tent visual link—the consistent logic—between heterogeneous texts, machines, and buildings. All of IBM’s products were submitted to the rigors of this systemic yet flexible approach. The design of the computers, which by about 1954 had been miniaturized from the scale of architecture to the scale of furniture, was the primary site of reform. Critiquing the appliqué chrome or curlicues of IBM’s earlier product designs, Noyes declared: “these machines should not be like a ranch house. They should be like a Mies house. They should have that much integrity and joy.”20 In con- junction with IBM’s in-house design team, and with the advice of his fellow consultants, Noyes worked out a set of design guidelines— a pattern book—that would guarantee the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638103322446451 by guest on 27 September 2021 computers’ “integrity and joy.” Almost regardless of their shape or specific function, they were to be enclosed in steel frames and covered over with enameled-steel panels, clearly labeled, and lined up in rows like furniture- scaled, curtain-walled skyscrapers.21

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In 1956, following the successes of new typewriters, calculators, and the 702, 705, and RAMAC computers, IBM began a process of rapid expansion on an international scale.22 This expansion, of course, and the move into the techno- logically demanding and rapidly changing market of computers, required new facilities. Noyes and his fellow consultants therefore fanned out, commissioning literally hundreds of buildings from their colleagues in the years 1956 to 1980: Eero Saarinen, John Bolles, Paul Rudolph, Victor Lundy, Marcel Breuer, , Harrison and Abramovitz, and many more large commer- cial firms and local architects were called upon to deliver “simply the best in modern design” at an architectural scale.23 Though these buildings were rea- sonably diverse in appearance, they were all united by a common design logic motivated by the desire for IBM’s space to communicate in parallel with the dic- tates of its management and its products. IBM’s engineers provided the modules for laboratory, factory, and office buildings, demanded clear interior spans for flexibility, and set requirements for maximum and minimum lighting; however, their common logic was also the direct result of the demands the computers placed upon architecture. In order to “extend . . . control over [the] environment” by the manipulation of information, IBM’s computers and all their accoutrements—including their operators—required their own environment, within which they could function optimally. To this end, Noyes himself set the tone for the building campaign by developing a mode of environmental enclosure based on two different but inter- related organizational and communication logics. On one hand, the dramatically patterned, opaque surfaces of IBM’s buildings were understood as metaphorical residues or imprints left upon architecture (considered as a “parallel commu- nication path”) by the passage of IBM’s primary activity—data processing or “pattern recognition”24—through the medium of architecture. On the other hand, Noyes was concerned to enclose and define a tightly controlled, trans- parent interior based on the typology—and topology—of the monastic or domes- tic courtyard. Taken together, these two logics indicate an understanding of architecture as a closed counterenvironment.25 That is, the environment of IBM was to become a space organized in opposition to, and set apart from, its

Paul Rand and Eliot Noyes. IBM signage, ca. 1956.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638103322446451 by guest on 27 September 2021 surroundings. Its diverse spaces—factories, laboratories, administration build- ings—across the United States (and indeed the globe) were to be linked together by these rigorous logics in a closed system, internally coherent precisely because of their stark separation from any outside interference. Noyes first developed this approach in two buildings (now demolished) designed for IBM’s Poughkeepsie campus, the first begun just before the official design program had been established: the 1955 IBM Development Laboratory and the 1956–1959 IBM Education Center. The exteriors of each building were curtain walls of two-tone grey, enamel-coated, extruded aluminum panels— a motif echoed in several IBM buildings of the same years, notably Saarinen’s two-tone blue curtain wall for a plant in Rochester, Minnesota—broken by con- tinuous strands of ribbon windows. The laboratory was divided into two nearly identical wings, set at a right angle and connected by glass-enclosed walkways. In short, it was a literal enlargement of the binuclear house26 to the scale of the laboratory. In accordance with IBM laboratory design guidelines, the nearly clear-span interiors were divided only by flexible partition walls, and services were brought in through suspended modular ceilings.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638103322446451 by guest on 27 September 2021 The Education Center was built to house training programs for up to 700 “customer executives, IBM salesmen and service engineers, and customer engi- neers” at a time, as a place to “study the application, use and maintenance of various IBM data processing machines and systems.”27 The large thirty-foot bays and light steel structure allowed for clear spans in the interior, which on the ground floor is divided into two sections on the east and west sides of the build- ing, separated by hallways and an auditorium on the south side. Recalling Noyes’s own home, completed as the Education Center was begun in 1956, it is essentially a two-wing program compressed into a single large volume, orga- nized around a central courtyard.28 The cultivated, ordered garden of the court- yard, surrounded by cloisterlike glass-walled hallways at ground level, was set in stark contrast to the surrounding landscape, which was left more or less “as is.” Thus, the “square doughnut” of the plan was focused inward, the patterned exterior mediating between the disordered landscape outside and the flexible, open interior organized around a central, ordered, and meditative landscape inside. The two wings were loosely divided by function: the eastern half of the Education Center housed multiple classrooms and services, while the west side featured a cafeteria, offices, and a large open space for company exhibitions. This last space was to become a near-universal requisite for IBM branch offices across the United States and beyond. In the 1950s and 1960s Noyes, in conjunction with the Eameses and George Nelson, designed display systems and drafted content for traveling IBM exhibitions intended to teach employees and clients about the company’s new products and services.29 Lightweight, easily transported, and flexibly rearranged, these aluminum-framed exhibits were erected in lobbies and sales offices with frequency and regularity, often accompanied by engineers and female models as demonstrators. More than any- thing else, the corporate environment in the Education Center and beyond was a didactic one (again, literally one of Noyes and Watson’s “parallel communi- cation paths”)—an ordered informational space set apart from the external envi- ronment and turned in upon itself. It was through this organizational logic—the monastic/domestic-turned-corporate environment—that IBM was to be able to define, defend, and extend itself. And, perhaps more important, it was under- stood as an environment in which humans could safely and effectively interact with and integrate themselves with machines. Noyes extended this design logic to a radical extreme in his later pro- jects for IBM. In the IBM Aerospace

Opposite, top: Eliot Noyes and Associates. IBM Development Laboratory, Poughkeepsie, 1955. Opposite, bottom: Eliot Noyes and Associates. IBM Education Center, Poughkeepsie, 1956–59. Right: Eliot Noyes and Associates. IBM Education Center, Poughkeepsie, 1956–59.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638103322446451 by guest on 27 September 2021 Headquarters in (1964), which he designed in conjunction with the California architect-engineer duo Quincy Jones and Frederick Emmons, the courtyard as a representation of environmental control is no longer an actual courtyard but rather a courtyard turned literally inside out. In the interior the representation of an ordered counter-environment is created not by a cultivated garden but with a modular pattern, the extension of the geometry and organiza- tional logic of the Poughkeepsie courtyard to cover and enclose the entire build- ing. Held by a structural steel cage sitting on massive concrete “tree” columns at its base, the strongly patterned concrete “window wall” panels—which create the impression on the exterior that the building is a giant three-dimensional punch card—focus attention inward by simultaneously representing the infor- mation patterns of the work at hand and denying coherent views to the exterior. That Noyes saw the panels as an extension of the courtyard design logic is made more explicit by the fact that he tested the Aerospace Headquarters design by erecting a mock-up panel on the glass wall of the courtyard of his own house in New Canaan—the patterned wall panels had an effect similar to that of looking into an ordered garden or cloister.30 In the IBM Branch Office at Garden City, New York, of the same year, Noyes pushed this window-wall to an almost perverse extreme, by nearly eliminating windows altogether. The narrow slivers of glazing, running perpendicular to the wall surface behind the projecting concrete rectangles, have the effect in the interior of transforming the window into something like a modular fluorescent light fixture (and this only on sunny days). As with the Poughkeepsie buildings, Noyes’s IBM buildings in the early 1960s are paradigmatic of the whole of IBM’s

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638103322446451 by guest on 27 September 2021 building program—the IBM counterenvironment. From Marcel Breuer’s IBM France Research and Development Laboratory (1960–1962) to Paul Rudolph’s manufacturing, engineering, and administration megaplex (1963) in East Fishkill, New York, the sleek curtain walls of Noyes and Saarinen give way to roughly textured, austere-looking reinforced concrete structures. This change in appear- ance apparently coincided with an industry-wide “assault on Fortress IBM.”31

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By 1963 IBM was right on target, achieving Watson’s goals of the 1950s and pushing way beyond even the most optimistic expectations. It controlled over 70 percent of the computer market in the United States; however, several com- petitors—including Sperry Rand, RCA, Honeywell, and several newcomers— were attempting to unseat it, and it was plagued by constant government antitrust suits. IBM had itself become a target—not only of its competitors but also of the federal judiciary (though the legislative and executive branches had a more lenient attitude toward IBM because of its constant willingness and ability to collaborate on high-priority Cold War military projects). IBM was also embarking on the extremely high-risk venture of marketing a modular, inter- machine-compatible computer array: the System/360. Under immense financial pressure,32 the corporation installed a new, centralized Real Estate and Construction Division to oversee its still massive expansion program, which would cut costs by providing more pragmatic and “humble” facilities. This state of affairs also demanded a change in image. As John Morris Dixon put it, writing for the Architectural Forum in 1966, “IBM apparently decided that an image of wealth was a liability. . . . Stories abound of carpet removed or fine wood painted over.”33 In other words, Noyes’s reinforced concrete window-walls were not just cheap; they were strategic. Beyond the creation of the new real estate division, IBM’s design strategy had actually changed very little. Or, more precisely, the IBM design logic had been radicalized—moved toward its limit case. The patterns of Saarinen’s and Noyes’s curtain walls were not gone; rather, they had embedded themselves in the thick reinforced concrete walls of the new buildings. This is attested to by the fact that two photographs of IBM France, a tree column and

Opposite: Eliot Noyes and Associates, Quincy Jones, and Frederick Emmons. IBM Aerospace Headquarters, Los Angeles, 1964. Right: Eliot Noyes and Associates. IBM Branch Office, Garden City, New York, 1964.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638103322446451 by guest on 27 September 2021 a shot along the length of its curved concrete façade, as well as a photograph of the Noyes-designed IBM System/360 computer, appear in Gyorgy Kepes’s The Man-Made Object (1966).34 The well-known series of books that Kepes edited for the publisher George Braziller in the mid- to late 1960s are documents of the application of such scientific concepts as system and communication the- ory and Gestalt psychology to the understanding of the arts and humanities. Within this context images such as the photographs of Breuer’s buildings and Noyes’s and IBM’s computers were to be understood as efficient, satisfactory, and even poetic solutions to design problems because they operated at the level of metaphor, in the sense noted above. The patterns of the façades of both build- ing and computer were to be read as figuring the process of organization and “pattern recognition” going on inside. However, it is important to note that here design achieves this representational operation only at the level of metaphor, because of its literal opacity, its refusal or inability to present the counter- environment within. As Noyes wrote of his own concrete curtain walls: [D]etails must play their part in relation to the overall concept and character of the building, and are the means by which the architect may underline his main idea, reinforce it, echo it, intensify or dramatize it. . . . I like details . . . to be simple, practical, efficient, articulate, appropriate, neat, handsome, and contributory to the clarity of all relationships. The converse of this is that the spectator may observe and enjoy details, and find in them an extension of his experience and understanding of the architecture. In them he should be able to read, or at least see reflected, the character and spirit of the entire building—as to see the universe in a grain of sand.35 Noyes’s statement should be taken at face value; his concrete walls are a dramatization of the “character” of his buildings. They are “contributory to the clarity of all relationships” insofar as they clearly demarcate and separate interior from exterior, and announce this fact on the very surfaces of the buildings through a manipulation of pattern in depth and radical opacity. However, one should again note that the façades only “reflect” patterns; it is thus of interest that Noyes says nothing

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638103322446451 by guest on 27 September 2021 of the interior—the space for which his introverted “courtyard” design logic had been developed. The stakes of Noyes’s radicalization of the boundary between exterior and interior can be most clearly seen in another addition to the IBM Poughkeepsie campus: the “white room.” This was a temporary building (now destroyed)— “a shack,” according to one of the IBM Design Department engineers36—erected near the development lab, with blank white walls, floor, and ceiling. Noyes built it as a setting for photographing all IBM products for catalogues, ads, and exhi- bitions. It was also the site of semiannual design critiques, when Noyes gath- ered together the IBM design team and his fellow consultants (Eames, Nelson, Rand, Kaufmann) to evaluate work in progress on all of IBM’s products. Beyond its futuristic “clean room” aesthetic appeal, it is clear that Noyes considered the “white room” a space in and through which IBM could most efficiently com- municate its capacity to control information—a noiseless space, almost hermeti- cally sealed, devoid of unwanted environmental stimulus. Here at last, in the form of a totalizing anti- or counterenvironment, was the “objectivity, impersonality, and neutrality of the machine” demanded by Mumford in the Organic Design catalogue. The problem of designing the space of interaction between humans and machines had been reduced to a minimax equation: if the problem of communication was a matter of reducing interfer- ence by “smoothing” the space through which the message passed, the problem of ergonomics was a matter of eliminating any environmental stimulus. The reduction of the counterenvironment to machines organized on a grid pattern on a white field and surrounded by white walls provides an image of a design logic taken to its limit with rigor. In an effort to support the mechanisms of con- trol, design, conceived of as an act of creating an ideal space for the interaction of human and machine, finds itself, under the requirements of the same logic, attempting to effect the elimination of the space separating the two. It is this desire for a space or system of total control that motivates the design logic of the Westinghouse Tele-Computer Center, an architec- ture of real-time management.

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Real-time computing as a technological possibility began, in fact, with IBM’s commission (in con- junction with MIT and numerous other corporations)

Opposite: Marcel Breuer. IBM Research and Development Laboratory, La Gaude, France, 1960–62. Published in The Man- Made Object, 1966. Right: Comparison of the IBM System/360 Computer to a “Shaker Room.” Published in The Man-Made Object, 1966.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638103322446451 by guest on 27 September 2021 from the United States Air Force to protect the country against a surprise Soviet air attack. The program, called Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), begun in 1951 and fully operational by 1963, was based on the desire for semi-automatic control of the basic environment in which the organiza- tion (here the Air Defense Command) does business, which every real-time system is about. . . . It does the job with a network of radar-fed computers that continuously analyze every cubic foot of air space around the United States, instantly track all airborne objects approaching the country, and call for appropriate action.37 The SAGE computers—the first to make extensive use of magnetic memory cores and parallel processing38—were directly hooked up to radar installations distributed across the periphery of North America and housed in massive win- dowless concrete buildings. Four stories high, with a four-acre footprint, these identical bunkerlike installations were mostly filled with hardware and its req- uisite services (redundant power generators and cooling plants). However, they

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638103322446451 by guest on 27 September 2021 also required operators—after all, a semiautomatic rifle is only semiautomatic in the sense that it needs a human being to pull the trigger—who sat at the radar screens tracking the aircraft, interacting with the computers via light guns, in an environment wholly blank save for the technology itself. Located inside the SAGE bunkers, and thus inside the computer itself, these “blue rooms,” so called because the only light emanated from the cathode-ray displays of the computer terminals, were spaces wholly defined by the logic of real-time management of airspace. Despite their locations at discrete points, these semiautomatic counter- environments were topologically pulled together into a more or less seamless network, both at the technological level of information flow and at the level of architecture. However, the paradox is self-evident: these blue rooms, connected only to other blue rooms and their weaponized extensions (anti-aircraft instal- lations, fighter squadrons), extend control over the “ground environment”—the defensible territory—only as they segregate themselves spatially as thoroughly as possible from that environment, behind the thick concrete walls of the bunker. It is not possible to conduct a process of extension without the outside that extension implies. The (irrefutably archi- tectural) closing off of the technological counterenvironment of the SAGE bunkers from its territorial surroundings thus corre- sponds to a desire to close off that territory from its wider surroundings. Real-time technology, even in the context of business, as the application of the dynam- ics of ultimate speed and feedback to an environment, is thus explicitly a phenome- non of what Paul Virilio has called “pure war.” It is, at bottom, “strategic,” in the sense that it is simultaneously offensive and defen- sive—a deterrent. In the constant technolog- ical advance of war, “it is no longer enough to be quickly educated about one’s surround- ings; one must also educate the surroundings. In other words, one must try to preserve, on that very spot, one’s head start over the enemy.”39 In a world in which the speed and range of real-time management and inter- continental ballistic missiles have collapsed markets and airspace such that everywhere

Opposite: SAGE direction center, ca. 1959. Right, top: Diagram of SAGE showing command and control operations, ca. 1959. Right, bottom: SAGE operators seated at consoles, ca. 1959.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638103322446451 by guest on 27 September 2021 is linked to everywhere else, the desire for a “fortress” designed to protect not the nation but another type of body, the corporation, becomes not literally a matter of erecting battlements and moats but a matter of strategy. The control of a territory (here a market) is also a matter of control over time—“a head start”— made possible only by the seemingly paradoxical delay, reorganization, and redeployment of information via the newly developed memories of computers and by the cinematic projection of images within a system of spatial enclosure adapted to the logic of real-time management.40 Thus, despite the spiny exteriors of the buildings housing the totalizing corporate counter-environment that he was hired to create at Westinghouse, just as he had at IBM, Noyes’s architecture is one not just of enclosure but of exten- sion. That is, the Tele-Computer Center’s opaque, and perhaps banal, exterior may be read as an indication of its actual radical, albeit invisible, connections to other such spaces through the spatial and temporal mechanics of real-time management. Just as in his projects for IBM, Noyes saw the creation of a strongly defined space for a community engaged in radically accelerated, radically medi- ated communication as a constituent factor in the corporation’s attempt to sustain and reproduce itself. That Noyes recognized the warlike nature of Westinghouse’s operations is certain. In his own words: Westinghouse is easy to think of as a maker of household appliances. But three-quarters of their business is in a vastly more important and exciting area—the development and distribution of power. What they are doing has implications for the safety of the country, possibly even the survival of the planet. So if you start looking at Westinghouse in those terms instead of just as a maker of household products, you get a quite different notion about how it ought to look.41 The two Sperry Rand UNIVAC computers of the Westinghouse Tele-Computer Center, linking up 360 offices, factories, and warehouses in real time, were therefore required to be housed in an internal domestic-monastic

Top: Eliot Noyes and Associates. Westinghouse Tele-Computer Center, with previous Westinghouse office building in background, near Pittsburgh, 1964. Bottom: Eliot Noyes and Associates. Tele-Computer Center, 1964. Site plan.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638103322446451 by guest on 27 September 2021 glass courtyard—both for the practical purpose of cooling the machines and for representational reasons—accompanied by ergonomically sound Saarinen fur- niture and serviced by a surrounding membrane of flexible cells. And all this at the center of a building set at some remove from Westinghouse corporate head- quarters located in the center of Pittsburgh. It can be readily compared to the air force’s headquarters in Colorado, with its rigidly modular Academy above ground and its bunkers buried deep in the mountains, hooked up to SAGE bunkers and radar stations just like it across the country.42

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Three years after the completion of the Westinghouse Tele-Computer Center, Noyes developed yet another set of architectural images of counterenviron- ments that could withstand an even more radically hostile environment, when his office was hired as design consultant to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).43 The film is a rather heavy-handed but deeply ambiguous para- ble about the confrontation of man with technology, from the first deadly club to the contemporary crisis of thinking machines, moving from the desolate pri- mordial wasteland to the utter void of outer space. Read as such a parable, Kubrick’s film is essentially a document of a per- ceived environmental crisis. From the film’s space shuttle, equipped with a modified version of Noyes’s executive plane service to allow efficient eating in zero gravity, to the space station, decked out with Herman Miller furni- ture hand picked by the Noyes office, to the computers and space suits, outfitted with controls designed by the Noyes office, 2001 presents, even fetishizes—with all of the paranoia implicit in the fetish—counterenvi- ronmental technology. The plot of the film is quite simply the acceleration of technology to the point at which its nature as “pure war” is made explicit. In the film’s concluding sequence, the astronaut Dave leaves in a space pod

Top: Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. United States Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, 1956–62. Bottom: Herbert Bayer, William Garnett, and Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. Exhibition display for U.S. Air Force Academy. Site plan, photomural, and super- graphic, 1955.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638103322446451 by guest on 27 September 2021 for Jupiter’s moon, thus winning a Pyrrhic victory in his war with the thinking machine Hal, a supercomputer that literally transforms the self-preserving envi- ronment of the spaceship into a hostile one. Arriving at the appointed destina- tion of his mission, he shoots through psychedelic space at the speed of light. But where does he end up? Isolated in a white room, fitted with a minimal and surreal Louis XVI décor, aging rapidly, and haunted by the specters of human technology that can be seen only as extensions of himself. Seen from the perspective of a human body threatened by death in the face of pure speed, Noyes’s encounters with the problem of providing a counterenvi- ronment for the acceleration of mankind and its technology in its attempt to establish control over increasingly large and hostile environments, whether in the case of real-time management or space travel, thus emerge as probings toward a hypothetical limit case of architecture. These probings explicitly acknowledge architecture as a tool for generating strategic enclosures in an economy (and a war) of constantly shifting communication techniques and organizational structures. Architecture, conceived of in this way, becomes something like a cybernetic, ergonomically sound, and almost hermetically sealed Vitruvian hut: a counterenvironment designed to preserve the human, corporate, or national body from an ever changing, ever hostile outside.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638103322446451 by guest on 27 September 2021 Notes 1. Gilbert Burck and the editors of Fortune, The Computer Age and Its Potential for Management (New York, Evanston and London: Harper & Row, 1965), 26–43. 2. 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. 3. Noyes’s emphasis on teamwork as a central, though not explicitly worked out, theme in the exhibition closely parallels Gropius’s growing interest in the matter and was probably taken up directly from Gropius’s teachings at the and at Harvard. See in particular Gropius’s later publications on the subject; e.g., Walter Gropius, The Scope of Total Architecture (1943; reprint, New York: Harper, 1955). 4. Besides Saarinen and Eames, the winning teams were Oscar Stonorov and Willo von Moltke; Martin Craig and Ann Hatfield; and Harry Weese and Benjamin Baldwin. Other teams were given honorable mentions. For the entire list of categories and awards, see the inside cover, facing page, of Noyes, Organic Design. 5. 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 inher- ently 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. 6. 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, includ- ing anthropometrics and “human engineering.” For the first authoritative contemporary overview of the subject, see K.F.H. Murrell, Ergonomics (London: Chapman and Hall, 1965). 7. From his first experience flying gliders on an archaeological dig in in 1934–1935, Noyes maintained a lifelong fascination with flight. This and the following information about Noyes’s early career and initial encounter with Watson were obtained in interviews with Noyes’s daughter Mary Brust (25 February 2002), his son Frederick Noyes (28 February 2002), and his former secretary Sandy Garsson (27 February 2002). 8. Letters in the Archives of American Art (Breuer 5711/0256), dating from 22 July to 16 October

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638103322446451 by guest on 27 September 2021 1947, document the Noyes-Breuer partnership in architecture and industrial design. 9. The account of Watson’s reorganization and redirection of IBM is summarized from Emerson W. Pugh, Building IBM: Shaping and Industry and Its Technology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995); and Robert Sobel, Part II: “The Computer Wars,” I.B.M.: Colossus in Transition (New York: Times Books, 1981). 10. Related in Thomas J. Watson Jr. and Peter Petre, Father, Son & Co. (New York: Bantam, 1994), 258: “The Olivetti material was filled with color and excitement and fit together like a beau- tiful picture puzzle. Ours looked like directions on how to make bicarbonate of soda.” In all like- lihood Watson is referring to the numerous advertisements and catalogues produced by the modernist graphic and industrial designer Marcello Nizzoli, who worked at Olivetti from 1938 onward. Watson had also seen the newly unveiled Olivetti showroom in Manhattan, in the former Pepsi-Cola building at 500 Park Avenue (designed by SOM), which was designed by BBPR in 1953–1954. On Olivetti’s design program, see Patrizia Bonifazio and Paolo Scrivano, Olivetti Builds: Modern Architecture in Ivrea, Guide to the Open Air Museum (Ivrea and New York: Olivetti, 2001). 11. Watson and Petre, 259. 12. Watson and Petre, 260. 13. 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. 14. Watson and Petre, 260. 15. From Thomas J. Watson Jr., in A Business and Its Beliefs: The Ideas That Helped Build IBM, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), 59–60. 16. Watson and Petre, 260. 17. Quoted in Scott Kelly, “Curator of corporate character . . . Eliot Noyes and Associates,” Industrial Design 13, no. 5 (June 1966): 43; emphasis added. 18. Hugh B. Johnston, “From Old IBM to New IBM,” Industrial Design 4, no. 3 (March 1957): 48–53; emphasis added. 19. Eliot Noyes, “A Sign Study for IBM,” Architectural Record 127, no. 7 (June 1960): 150–164. 20. Johnston, 51. 21. 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. 22. For an account of IBM’s expansion in these years, see Henry Bakis, I.B.M.: Une multi- nationale régionale (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1977); Pugh, Building IBM; and Sobel. 23. For broad overviews of the various IBM commissions in these years, see “IBM’s New Corporate Face,” Architectural Forum 106 (February 1957): 106–114; Paul R. Damaz, “Les Constructions I.B.M.,” Architecture d’aujourd’hui 34 (December 1963–January 1964): 40–50; and John Morris

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638103322446451 by guest on 27 September 2021 Dixon, “I.B.M. Thinks Twice,” Architectural Forum 124, no. 2 (March 1966): 32–39. 24. Here I apply, at least in part, Marshall McLuhan’s definition of metaphor, which is devel- oped in response to “the rise of the idea of transportation as communication, and then the tran- sition of the idea from transport to information by means of electricity. The word ‘metaphor’ is from the Greek meta plus pherein, to carry across or transport. . . . Each form of transport not only carries, but translates and transforms, the sender, the receiver, and the message.” See McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 91. Viewed from this perspective, architecture conceived of as the vehicle (not quite sender, receiver, or message but rather an environmental enclosure for all three) of communication—as it is in the case of IBM and later at Westinghouse—would have been understood as “translated and transformed” by the very process of that communication. The use here of “pattern recognition” as a mode of cogni- tion is also drawn from Understanding Media, where McLuhan makes frequent reference to IBM as a company “in the business of processing information” (e.g., 24). 25. 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, and further developed in McLuhan and Harley Parker, Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), in the essays “Sensory Modes” (1–31) and “The Emperor’s New Clothes” (237–291). However, here it has been reappropriated. Rather than accepting his “New Critical” use of the concept to describe a metaphorical, mental “landscape” or “space” generated by the work of art from which the consequences of emerging social and technical relations may be gauged, the term is used here to conceptualize a designed space that is closed off from its surroundings and only linked to like spaces via specific media (e.g., real-time computing). As such, the term is not used entirely disingenuously, since it simply places increased emphasis on the closure implied by the prefix counter- and is consonant with McLuhan’s interest in describing a mode of cognition that offers the potential for the control of external environments via an independently conceived logical system. 26. 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. 27. “Clarity, Cohesiveness, Good Detail; IBM Education Center, Poughkeepsie, New York,” Architectural Record 126 (September 1959): 199–204. 28. 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 power- fully simple integration of a binuclear plan into a single, enclosed volume; see, for example, “House, New Canaan, Connecticut,” Progressive Architecture 35 (January 1954): 122; “House: New Canaan, Connecticut,” Progressive Architecture 37 (December 1956): 98–105; John Peter, “The New Early American Look in Home Living,” Look 20, no. 8 (17 April 1956): 72–73; and John Peter, “For Women Only,” Look 20, no. 8 (17 April 1956): 76. 29. On IBM’s exhibition designs, see James H. Carmel, Exhibition Techniques, Traveling and Temporary (New York: Reinhold, 1962), 62–63, 111, 164–168; Karl Kaspar, International Shop Design (London: Thames and Hudson, 1967), 74–77; George Nelson, Display (1953; reprint, New

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638103322446451 by guest on 27 September 2021 York: Whitney Publications, 1956); and The Office of Charles and Ray Eames, A Computer Perspective: Background to the Computer Age, 2nd ed. (1973; reprint, Cambridge: Press, 1990). 30. This effect is attested to—and naturalized, vis-à-vis the architectural press—by Noyes in a presentation of his work for IBM in the 1960s in Architectural Record: “It felt very good, and reminded me of the kind of window wall one encounters in India, so perforated that it is indeed both wall and window at once. It also had some of the quality of an old-fashioned back porch, enclosed in wooden latticework.” See Eliot Noyes, “A Continuing Study of the Window Wall by Eliot Noyes,” Architectural Record 141, no. 4 (April 1967): 173–180. 31. See Burck and the editors of Fortune, ch. 4 (“The ‘Assault’ on Fortress I.B.M.”). The authors argue that in fact IBM is and was in little danger of losing its position as the largest and most prof- itable computer corporation. However, they also point out the risks associated with IBM’s con- temporary massive investment in the new, modular System/360 computers. See also Pugh, Building IBM, ch. 18. 32. In the years after 1957 IBM floated debts greater than its net worth, betting that its new products and its death grip on the market would ensure that the corporation doubled in size roughly every five years. In addition to Watson and Petre, see William B. Harris, “The Astonishing Computers,” Fortune 55 (June 1957): 136–139, 292, 294, 296, 298; and Francis Bello, “The War of the Computers,” Fortune 59 (October 1959), pp. 128–132, 160, 164, 166, 171. 33. Dixon, 36. 34. Gyorgy Kepes, ed., The Man-Made Object (New York: George Braziller, 1966). The photo of the System/360 computer, juxtaposed in a two-page spread with a spare interior titled “Furnishings of a Shaker Room,” appears on 21. The IBM France photographs accompany Breuer’s short essay, “Genesis of Design,” in The Man-Made Object, ed. Kepes, 120–125. 35. Eliot Noyes, “Architectural Details [7],” Architectural Record 139 (January 1966): 121; emphasis added. It is interesting to note that Noyes says nothing here of structure, and that his details, though presented in the context of a professional journal in which such details are generally treated as structural matters, are the nonstructural window-wall panels. These panels, in each case, are essentially suspended on the wall using a reinforced concrete version of curtain- wall technology. 36. James LaDue, interview, 19 June 2002. 37. Burck and the editors of Fortune, 31ff. 38. 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. 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. 39. Paul Virilio, Popular Defense & Ecological Struggles (New York: Semiotext(e), 1990): 15; emphasis in original. 40. Here it might be helpful to point out an often overlooked discrepancy between the mean- ing of the noun real time and the adjective real-time derived from it. The first is either “the actual time in which a physical process under computer study or control occurs [or] the time required for a computer to solve a problem, measured from the time data are fed in to the time a solution is

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638103322446451 by guest on 27 September 2021 received.” The adjective, however, elides any such reference to a concrete, measurable, “actual time”: “of or relating to computer systems that update information at the same rate as they receive data, enabling them to direct or control a process such as an automatic pilot.” That is, “real time” has to do with time, whereas “real-time” connotes a rate, speed. The real time of the Westinghouse Tele-Computer Center is not, as is evident from the Fortune anecdote, that of time but rather that of speed (“distant answers shot back in seconds”). However, despite the high speed of these real- time management transactions, it is nonetheless critical to note that the fundamental basis of real- time computing lies within the dimension of time—delay. Information is taken from the environment, here the corporation itself and the market within which it operates, stored in the computer’s electromagnetic memory core, and only later (sometimes only a fraction of a second, but nonetheless a measurable amount of [real] time) retrieved and processed in parallel—at the same time—with other connected or relevant pieces of information. Lastly, this information processed in “real time” is rendered into a visual-textual image on a screen in a dimly lit space already specifically tailored for the decision-making responses of “real-time management.” That is, this delay, in which information from elsewhere is brought inside the computer, its movement stalled until it can be recombined with other bits of information and then made visible on a screen, constitutes the locus of the act of organization in real time. This delay is difficult to rec- ognize for two reasons: On the one hand, it occurs constantly, as information is updated at the same rate as it is gathered; on the other, the speed of the process during which it occurs is so fast that its gaps are almost literally imperceptible. The delay, the “real time” of “real-time comput- ing” is thus rendered imperceptible to the human sensorium by the familiar tactics of cinematic projection. Compare with Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller (London and New York: Verso, 1989), 6: “There is no war, then, without representation, no sophisticated weaponry without psychological mystification. Weapons are tools not just of destruction but also of perception—that is to say, stimulants that make themselves felt through chemical, neurological processes in the sense organs and the central nervous system, affecting human reactions and even the perceptual identification and differentiation of objects.” 41. Kelly; emphasis added. 42. 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. 43. Gordon Bruce (a former partner in Noyes and Associates), interview, 2 April 2002. The “on-set” designer for 2001 was Noyes’s partner Ernest Bevilacqua. On Bevilacqua’s role in the office, see Kelly, 38–39. IBM engineers also helped design the appearances and interfaces of the numerous com- puters depicted in the film. See Frederick I. Ordway III, “2001: A Space Odyssey in Retrospect” (1970); available from: http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0075.html. Ordway was scientific consultant and technical adviser to the film. Noyes’s office, apparently on the strength of their con- vincing designs for 2001, was later hired by North American Rockwell to design the Skylab Space Station in 1971. The office performed a “Habitability Study” for Rockwell on how to coordinate the normal functions of daily life with a vehicle that generated gravitational forces via the Coriolis effect.

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