|
Noyes, Eliot (Fette)
(b Boston, 12 Aug 1910; d New Canaan, CT, 18 July 1977). American architect and designer. He studied at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, gaining a bachelor’s degree in classics in 1932 and a master’s in architecture in 1938. He then joined the firm of Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer in Cambridge. From 1939 to 1946, with a break for service in World War II, he was Director of the Department of Industrial Design at MOMA, New York, and in 1947 he founded his own architectural and industrial design practice, Eliot Noyes & Associates. An advocate of functional Modernism, Noyes’s work is firmly grounded in the tradition of Gropius, Breuer and Le Corbusier. He advocated simplicity of form and truth to the nature of materials, seen particularly in his houses, for example Graham House (1970), Greenwich, CT. Here he employed open interior spaces and clear geometry, with a suppression of ornament that betrays the influence of Mies van der Rohe; a free-standing fireplace dividing the living and dining space and the use of stone partitions are features that also became hallmarks of his house designs. Noyes’s public buildings, for example the IBM Building (1963), Garden City, NY, are more severe but unpretentious. As an industrial designer he is best known for his work for IBM (e.g. IBM Selectric typewriter, 1971) and for the Mobil Oil Corporation (e.g. service station prototype and cylindrical petrol pumps, 1968). He is credited with establishing new standards of design for corporations, particularly IBM, with whom he was Consultant Director of Design. Here and elsewhere he provided a uniformity of design based on bold, clearly cut simplicity, making individual corporate identities instantly recognizable.
|
|
There are more than 45,000 articles in The Grove Dictionary of Art.
To access the rest of this article, including the bibliography, subscribe to
www.groveart.com.
To find out more about this subject, click on a related article below and
subscribe to www.groveart.com
|
