Military-Industrial Design Complex

“I am not a political guy,” says Eliot Noyes in the back half of Modernism, Inc. At that point in his career, though, the cat was out of the bag. The computers Noyes designed for IBM from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s had been used to drop bombs on Vietnam. Charles and Ray Eames, game as ever, had stepped in to clean up IBM’s image, making films to assuage people’s fear of computers—No, they’re not coming to kill you—but they were too late. Modernism’s no-nonsense, no-politics, straight-lined, straightforward, “good-design-is-good-business” ethos was under fire. Protesters turned up at the 1970 iteration of the International Design Conference in Aspen (IDCA), which Noyes chaired, demanding to know why designers were OK with being complicit in, among other things, war. Modernism, Inc. director Jason Cohn doesn’t really attempt an answer, but evidence of Noyes’s ease with the arrangement is everywhere in the film: the air force buddy who got the designer the IBM gig, the houses in Martha’s Vineyard, the compulsory classical music for the children. A life as frictionl…