With its proximity to the cultural hub of New York City and its quieter suburban and rural landscapes, Connecticut was fertile ground for artists and writers in the period of Modernist movements between 1913 and 1979. Many of these cultural figures are well known through biographical and critical studies. Creative Places seeks to show how place played a significant role in creative work, and how in turn the artists and writers influenced communities in Connecticut.
Eliot Noyes
Architecture/Design
1910 – 1977
Noyes promoted Modernist architecture and design both through his own work and by hiring contemporaries for client corporations such as IBM, Westinghouse, and Mobil. For the latter, he created the iconic round gas pumps and roofs associated with Mobil gas stations around the States. A 30-year resident of New Canaan, not only did his design his own home, but several others as well in the 1950s, and in 1974, the Wilton Library, since renovated and expanded.
- Biography/Description of Work
Eliot Fette Noyes attended the Harvard graduate architecture program starting in 1932. It trained students in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts tradition, but Noyes was intrigued by the avant-garde European ideas being explored by architects in the Bauhaus movement. Somewhat discontent, in 1935 he left to become a draftsman for an archaeological team in Iran, returning in 1937. By then the Harvard program had changed, with Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius in charge, and Noyes earned his degree in 1938. He worked in Gropius and Breuer’s office for a few years before becoming the first director of the Industrial Design Department at MoMA, New York. During his tenure there, he championed the work of Charles and Ray Eames. He 1946, he joined the industrial design firm of Norman Bel Geddes, but the office closed about a year later. Having begun work on a typewriter design for IBM, the firm’s CEO, Tom Watson, asked him to continue with the design process on his own, marking the beginning of his career as an industrial designer. He later designed the IBM Selectric typewriter in 1961 and various corporate buildings, as well as hiring Modernist architects such as Mies van der Rohe and Eero Saarinen to design corporate buildings around the world.
- Sources view
- http://www.preservationnation.org/travel-and-sites/sites/northeast-region/new-canaan-ct/sites/noyes-house-2.html
- Associated Resource(s)