The Interface: IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design, 1945–1976

Notes

231 Acknowledgments Notes 232 Notes to Introduction Introduction The Interface The epigraph is from Reyner Banham, “(Thinks): Think!” New Statesman, 11 October 1965, 109– 18; reprinted in Banham, Design by Choice, ed. Penny Sparks (New York: Rizzoli, 1981), 115–16. 1 Thomas Watson Jr. and Peter Petre, Father, Son & Co.: My Life at IBM and Beyond (New York: Bantam, 1994), 260. 2 On Behrens, see Stanford Anderson, Peter Behrens and a New Architecture for the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), which, in addition to being the most thorough single account of Behrens’s career, includes an exhaustive bibliography. 3 Walter Gropius, “Die Entwicklung moderner Industriebaukunst ,” in Form and Function: A Sourcebook for the History of Architecture and Design, 1890–1939, ed. Tim Benton, Charlotte Benton, and Dennis Sharp (London: Crosby Lockwood Staples, 1975), 53. 4 Ibid. 5 On Bayer and Container Corporation of America , see James Sloan Allen, The Romance of Commerce and Culture: Capitalism, Modernism and the Chicago-Aspen Crusade for Cultural Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), and Herbert Bayer, Collection and Archive at the Denver Art Museum (Denver: Denver Art Museum, 1988). Other important recent efforts to assess the history of corporate architecture and design are Janet Y. Abrams, “Constructing the Corporate Image: Architecture, Mass Media and the Early Multinational Corporation” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1989); Alexandra Lange, “Tower, Typewriter and Trademark: Architects, Designers and Corporate Utopia, 1956–64” (PhD diss., New York University Institute of Fine Arts, 2005); Hyun Tae Jung, “Organization and Abstraction: The Architecture of SOM from 1936 to 1956” (PhD diss. in progress, Columbia University). The most common monographs on corporate design are those on Olivetti, which, it is well known, provided an initial spur to IBM’s own design program. Yet despite cosmetic similarities between IBM and Olivetti (their business in office machines, the strong paternalism of their early leading figures), the two corporations hardly bear comparison in terms of their corporate structures and practices, economic importance, or even the means by which their designs were authored. Unlike IBM, Olivetti remained committed to the end to a patronage model of architectural and design production, and to a paternalistic corporate culture characteristic of the Italian context—in this regard, it is instructive to recall that Olivetti’s headquarters in Ivrea is called the Open-Air Museum. If more evidence is needed to convince the reader of the fundamental difference between Olivetti and IBM in terms of design culture and production, and the lack of direct influence of Olivetti on IBM in anything but the impulse to organize a design program at all, it should suffice to cite chronology. Marcello Nizzoli’s famous “spiral” logo for Olivetti was not designed until 1956, the same year in which Rand originally redesigned the IBM logo; Olivetti did not produce its first computer, the Elea 9000, until 1959, at which point Noyes and the industrial design firm of Sundberg-Ferar had already developed a modular ergonomic system for computers similar to that used in the Olivetti computer. The Elea 9000 was in fact designed just down the road from the Noyes and Associates Office in New Canaan, Connecticut, suggesting, if any connection can be made, that the formal relationship between Olivetti and IBM business machines is not a question of direct influence in a single direction. On Olivetti, see Bernard Huet and Georges Teyssot, eds., “Politique industrielle et architecture : Le cas Olivetti,” special issue, Architecture d’aujourd’hui, no. 188 (December 1976); Manfredo Tafuri, History of Italian Architecture, 1944–1985, trans. Jessica Levine (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), chap. 2, “Aufklärung I: Adriano Olivetti and the Communitas of the Intellect ”; Daniele Boltri et al., Architetture olivettiane a Ivrea: I luoghi del lavoro e i servizi socio-assistenziali di fabricca (Rome: Gangemi, 1998); Patrizia Bonifazio and Paolo Scrivano, Olivetti Builds: Modern Architecture in Ivrea; A Guide to the Open Air Museum (Milan: Skira, 2001); Rosano Astarita, Gli architetti di Olivetti: Una storia di committenza industriale (Milan: F. Angeli, 2000). Many more 233 Notes to Introduction articles on Olivetti, and the work of Nizzoli and Ettore Sottsass, could be listed here, but most are to be found in the most complete source of citations on the history of Olivetti, Eugenio Pacchioli’s L’Archivo storico Olivetti (Ivrea: Associazione Archivio storico Olivetti, 1998). See also Manfredo Tafuri’s damning analysis of the “backward” industrial culture of Italy in his essay...