Fred Noyes, principal of Frederick Noyes Architects in Brookline, Mass., enjoys vacationing at the family ski house in Killington that his father, the modern architect Eliot Noyes, designed in 1960. Perched on a hill, the modest home’s shed roof echoes the downhill slope; the open-plan interior, divided only by a massive cement-and-exposed-stone chimney, looks out through a wall of sliding glass doors to a deck and the woods beyond.
“It has such a warmth to that one space, and it’s so simple,” Fred, 81, said by phone. “After you ski, you fall on those couches and relax in front of this big fire. You’re part of the landscape.”
Eliot, who died in 1977, may not be as well known as other architects responsible for modernism in the U.S., such as Walter Gropius, Eero Saarinen and Frank Lloyd Wright. Yet he was “one of the pivotal figures of 20th-century architecture and design,” said Devin Colman, director of the University of Vermont historic preservation program and a specialist in modern architecture.
Just how pivotal is evident in the 2023 documentary Modernism, Inc.: The Eliot Noyes Design Story, which will be screened on Wednesday, December 10, as part of the Architecture + Design Film Series at Burlington City Hall Auditorium. Fred will attend the screening and speak about his father in a discussion moderated by Colman. Brattleboro’s 118 Elliot gallery also hosts a screening that day, and the film will be available to stream on the series website.
Directed by Jason Cohn, who previously made a documentary about designers Charles and Ray Eames, Modernism, Inc. largely tells the story of Noyes’ main — and completely revolutionary — job: design consultant at the burgeoning IBM corporation. There, he essentially invented the art of branding, immersing himself in every aspect of the company and defining its entire presence from the inside out. As the film makes clear, Steve Jobs’ approach to Apple would not exist without Noyes.
“Back then, they didn’t have words like ‘marketing’ or even ‘brand.’ They called it all ‘design,’ and they meant everything by it,” one interviewee in the film notes.
One tangible artifact is Noyes’ sleek, colorful IBM Selectric typewriter from 1961, which replaced single-letter strike arms with a rotating ball and eliminated the carriage return. By the mid-1960s, it commanded a quarter of the world market in electric typewriters. It’s held in the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian Institution and other museums around the world.
In one of the film’s most riveting moments, hippies overrun the 1970 meeting of the International Design Conference.
Noyes graduated from the Harvard School of Design in 1938, a year after Bauhaus founder Gropius arrived to lead it. He worked for Gropius and Marcel Breuer’s short-lived firm after graduation and became the first director of the new industrial design department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1948, he settled his family in New Canaan, Conn., and the rest of the so-called Harvard Five soon followed him there: Breuer, Philip Johnson, John M. Johansen and Landis Gores.
Noyes had a knack for spotting talent. He launched the Eameses’ careers and brought in Paul Rand, the so-called “father of graphic design,” and London-born designer Ivan Chermayeff to redesign corporate logos. Eventually, that exclusive design-world coterie generated a backlash. In one of the film’s most riveting moments, hippies overrun the 1970 meeting of the International Design Conference in Aspen, Colo., which Noyes led, protesting corporations’ lack of attention to the unmoneyed class and the environment.
Eli Noyes filmed that footage. Eliot’s oldest son, who died last year, became an Oscar-nominated film animator and pioneer in clay animation. He’s one of three of the four Noyes children who speak about their dad in the film, most memorably about what it was like to live in the family house in New Canaan. (They had to cross an outdoor courtyard to reach the bathroom — in all weather.)
The Noyes children all attended high school at the Putney School. Their father designed a dorm there in 1961, followed by a Killington neighbor’s ski house in 1962 and another in Stratton in 1964. Fred recalled helping his father design the chimney for the latter house while still a junior in college.
Noyes’ Vermont ties are not in the film, but his legacy in the Green Mountains includes something larger than his four works of architecture: IBM opened a plant in Essex Junction in 1957, and it lasted until 2015, when GlobalFoundries took it over.
Noyes effectively influenced “the lives and work of generations of Vermonters,” noted Andrew Chardain, a senior architect at Birdseye building company in Richmond, who founded the Architecture + Design Film Series in 2014 with Lynda McIntyre and Karen Frost. Neither Modernism, Inc. — the series’ 100th film — nor the increasingly rare perspective of a midcentury-modern architect’s son should be missed.
Modernism, Inc.: The Eliot Noyes Design Story, Wednesday, December 10, 6:30 p.m., at Burlington City Hall Auditorium (with Fred Noyes and Devin Colman) and 118 Elliot in Brattleboro; or screen from home same day only. Free. adfilmseries.org
The original print version of this article was headlined “By Design | The Architecture + Design Film Series’ 100th film celebrates Eliot Noyes, an influential midcentury-modern architect with Vermont ties”
This article appears in Dec 3-9 2025.
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