Zur Vorlesung 1?

Dinge der Moderne

Architekturgeschichte und -theorie IV

Text 3

Lektüreseminar
14. April / 28. April 2022

Autor/in John Harwood

Titel «IBM Architecture: The Multinational Counterenvironment»

Erschienen in The Interface: IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design, 1945-1976,
Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2011, S. 101–160 [109-112, 152-154]

www.stalder.arch.ethz.ch/vorlesungen

VORLESUNG ARCHITEKTURGESCHICHTE UND -THEORIE IV FRÜHLINGSSEMESTER 2022, DONNERSTAGS 13.45-15.30

PROFESSUR FÜR ARCHITEKTURTHEORIE PROF. DR. LAURENT STALDER, DR. ANDREAS KALPAKCI, DR. MATTHEW WELLS
The Interface
IBM and
the Transformation
of Corporate Design
1945-1976

John Harwood

A Quadrant Book

M
IN
NE University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London
SO
TA
Contents

1 Introduction
The Interface

17 Chapter One
Eliot Noyes, Paul Rand, and the Beginnings
of the IBM Design Program

59 Chapter Two
The Architecture of the Computer

101 Chapter Three

IBM Architecture
The Multinational Counterenvironment

161 Chapter Four

Naturalizing the Computer

IBM Spectacles

217 Conclusion
Virtual Paradoxes

229 Acknowledgments
233 Notes
271 Index
 IBM Architecture:
The Multinational
Counterenvironment
Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved.

A typewriter sits in a room in a building. There must be a sense of their relationships

in each of these.

Eliot Noyes

101 I B M Architecture
Harwood, John. 2011. The Interface : IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design, 1945–1976. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press. Accessed March 8, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from ethz on 2021-03-08 07:35:33.
 The rule of order is always also a system of measure; the architectural module is no ex-
ception. Whether articulated in one- or two-dimensional terms, the module nonetheless
always encloses a fixed amount of space—for example, five feet square, or a three-by-
three-by-three triangle. It is not formed by the intersection of lines extending to infinity
in orthogonal parallels and perpendiculars; it constructs that impression through the
reproduction of identical enclosures.26 The etymology of the term bears this out.27 The
English word “module” emerges from, and was originally identical to, “model” insofar
as the latter word originally signified not only the measurement of objects, but also of human
beings—“module” connoted one’s ability to accomplish a certain task. It has since
carried a string of meanings, the two most important of which are wholly opposite. On
the one hand, it signified a copy, even a leftover or remainder, a shadow of what once
was: a module was a “small-scale design,” such as a model of a building or sculpture
made after the fact, or a “mere image or counterfeit.” On the other hand, a module was
“a model for imitation . . . a perfect exemplar of something.” In mathematics, the module
is a key figure in set theory, denoting one half of a set undergoing some arithmetical
operation. Generically, and in the modern senses, a module is quite simply “a component
of a larger or more complex system.” Being a unit of serial delimitation, a module is
necessarily both part and multiple. Its multiplicity—whether by two, half, or any other
positive real number—is implied in the proposition of its very delimiting.

The term is thus in each instance infused with the properties of metonymy, and even
more precisely, because of the functional role that the module plays, of organicity. The
module is nothing without the whole of which it is a part, yet one finds architectural
theorists and practitioners again and again ascribing a generative role to it.28 Its tauto-
logical quality, as both end and generative moment—that unstable quality bound up with
the logistics of perspective and targeting—is what comes to lend modularity its appeal
to those designers concerned to model design after information theory and cybernetics,
in which the concepts of redundancy and feedback play such a central role.

The architecture of the laboratory and of the corporation thus begins to organize itself
Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved.

as the site of this monumental slippage, both as the ground plan or diagram of the trans-
actions between scales and materials and as the wall or textile that separates the
ordered world from the nonmodular chaos, the pure distance, the immeasurability of time
that lies beyond. A photograph of an IBM magnetic memory core (Figure 3.3), taken
by none other than Ansel Adams and set opposite an electron micrograph of a “crystal
of virus” in Gyorgy Kepes’s photo essay for his volume Module Proportion Symmetry
Rhythm (1966), perfectly illustrates the basic principle of corporate space. Just as the
Eames Office would, in these same years, come to describe the computer as a “land-
scape,” and through the same technologically advanced photography render the dis-
tribution of celestial bodies in the universe isomorphic to the interior of an atom in the
film Powers of Ten (1968), the corporate environment is an ever-expanding series of mod-
ules: CPU, I/O and storage devices, computer room, building, landscape, production
network, international installations, even satellites.29 The subject of this environment,

109 I B M Architecture
Harwood, John. 2011. The Interface : IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design, 1945–1976. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press. Accessed March 8, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from ethz on 2021-03-08 07:35:33.
 negation and assimilation: it is a counterenvironment, a space organized in contradistinc-
tion to the environment by annexing part of space and defining itself negatively with
respect to that space. Either that which is outside it may be ordered, and thus brought
inside, or it is negated. In short, the counterenvironment is what we might describe as a
homological or isomorphic engine, one that generates regularity and sameness as its very
raison d’être, and in so doing becomes the true subject at the core of the corporation.

IBM was both monastery and fortress, and its consultants and commissioned architects
provided the architectural apparatus of this counterenvironment. The commitment to the
module and metonymy as regulating principles, to the norm itself as a powerful and expan-
sive mode of identity,31 is paramount. As Noyes wrote of his own concrete curtain walls
for IBM:

Details must play their part in relation to the overall concept and character of the building, and
are the means by which the architect may underline his main idea, reinforce it, echo it, intensify
or dramatize it. . . . I like details . . . to be simple, practical, efficient, articulate, appropriate, neat,
handsome, and contributory to the clarity of all relationships.

The converse of this is that the spectator may observe and enjoy details, and find in them an
extension of his experience and understanding of the architecture. In them he should be able to
read, or at least see reflected, the character and spirit of the entire building—as to see the
universe in a grain of sand.32

Less important (though it is certainly not unimportant) than the appearance of the buildings
is the manner in which they adhere to this metonymic imperative of modularity. The
appearance of difference is precisely ideological—if by ideology we understand “logic
of appearance” rather than “science of ideas”33—and therefore tends to conceal the
fundamental identity that served to unite the architectural program (and here the conso-
nance with IBM’s function as a purveyor of programs should not be missed; see below).
The imperative of flexibility, which was and still is so often confused with modularity, is
Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved.

not so much a matter of function—for everyone knows, at least after Peter Blake,34 that
modular buildings have never been truly flexible in this sense—but rather a matter of
flexibility in form. Modularity is the formal condition of architecture considered as a medium
in the truest sense of McLuhan’s “law,” that it contains or is built up out of other media
and may be contained by other media in turn: its modularity may be registered and realized
in wood, concrete, steel, glass, plastic; it may be made reflective or semitransparent,
wholly opaque or even projected; and, perhaps most important, it may vary infinitely in scale.

The Courtyard, or Inside-Out

In 1956, anticipating further dramatic successes in the sale and leasing of its new com-
puter lines, IBM began a process of rapid expansion on an international scale. As I have

111 I B M Architecture
Harwood, John. 2011. The Interface : IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design, 1945–1976. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press. Accessed March 8, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from ethz on 2021-03-08 07:35:33.
 Figure 3.31 Foster Associates, IBM Pilot Head Offices, Cosham, Hampshire, 1973. View.

Data) Centre, which was to be operated by a wholly owned subsidiary—IBM Informa-

tion Services Ltd.—that would coordinate “the information needs of all the IBM plants
throughout the world.”129 Later, similar-looking warehouse facilities were added, but
the centerpiece of the complex was the building to house the computer administering
a real-time management of IBM products and facilities. Given the proximity of the
building’s program to that for a standard Noyes-designed IBM computer, only its scale
is surprising. Wholly blank on the exterior, it is clad in gigantic concrete panels, which
conceal the structure behind and are held in place with recessed black steel joints (ana-
logues of the feature strips of the System/360); the only windows are of heavily tinted glass
at the very top of the building. These provide no views, only a diffuse “natural” light falling
on the computer’s attendants from above.

The building, one begins to suspect, is little more than a large-scale realization of the com-
Copyright © 2011. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved.

puter, and the suspicion is confirmed by a second building designed for IBM by Foster
Associates in Cosham, near Portsmouth, of 1972–73 (Figure 3.31). This office building
was intended as a temporary installation, and IBM had originally intended to simply com-
mission a builder to produce a tilt-up shed for a computer and approximately one hundred
employees. However, it appears that Noyes and Foster approached IBM with a promise
that Foster’s design would deliver a superior product at lower cost and prevailed upon
RECD to experiment.

The mirrored bronze glass facade of the Cosham building, affixed to the structure at the
highest and lowest possible points with composite gaskets, caused the building to vanish
into the landscape in a play of reflections to the extent that the Italian journal Domus referred
to it as an “I.S.O. (Invisible Standing Object).”130 All that remained was a lattice of thin
lines of black steel, left as register of the delineation of a modular enclosure. On the

153 I B M Architecture
Harwood, John. 2011. The Interface : IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design, 1945–1976. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press. Accessed March 8, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from ethz on 2021-03-08 07:35:33.
 Notes
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231 Acknowledgments
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 corresponds to our contemporary notion of the reference for objects or facts which have yet
“resolution,” which is a measure of the clarity of to be in a position to be called such. The normal
the television image. On the role of the module in is then at once the extension and the exhibition
computer graphics and television, see Friedrich of the norm. It increases the rule at the same time
Kittler, “Computer Graphics: A Semi-Technical In- that it points it out. It asks for everything outside,
troduction,” Grey Room 2 (Winter 2001): 30–45. beside, and against it that still escapes it. A norm
26 The grid—as distinct from the finite grille con- draws its meaning, function, and value from the
structed from like forms, such as squares—only fact of the existence, outside itself, of what does
emerges in post-Cartesian mathematical thought. not meet the requirement it serves. The normal is
Perspectival technique, as outlined in treatises not a static or peaceful, but a dynamic and polemi-
such as Alberti’s De aedificatoria and De pictura, cal concept.”
only seems to construct an image of infinite ex- 32 Eliot Noyes, “Architectural Details [7],” Archi-
tension through the device of the vanishing point; tectural Record 139 (January 1966): 121. My
however, as Erwin Panofsky and Hubert Damisch emphasis.
both demonstrate (in very different terms), math- 33 See Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aes-
ematical perspective is always already established thetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), chaps. 1–3,
through the imposition of a frame. See Panofsky, and esp. 87–88; and Louis Althusser, “Ideology
Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards
S. Wood (New York: Zone, 1993), 27–72; and an Investigation)” (January–April 1969) and “Post-
Damisch, Origin of Perspective. Also useful on the script,” trans. Ben Brewster, in Althusser, Lenin and
nature of the grid is “Hubert Damisch and Ste- Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly
phen Bann: A Conversation,” Oxford Art Journal Review Press, 1971), 127–86.
28, no. 2 (2005): 172. I thank Stephen Bann for 34 Peter Blake, Form Follows Fiasco: Why Mod-
bringing this discussion to my attention. ern Architecture Hasn’t Worked (New York: Little,
27 See entries for “module” and “model,” Oxford Brown, 1977), “The Fantasy of the Open Plan,” 33.
English Dictionary, online edition. 35 “IBM . . . Only Yesterday—Now Tomorrow,”
28 This is perhaps most dramatically demon- promotional pamphlet, [1966], Poughkeepsie Box
strated by the French “rationalist” tradition in 49, Folder “Divisions,” IBM Corporate Archives.
architectural design (see, for example, J.-N.-L. 36 After Noyes’s additions to the campus, the
Durand, Précis des leçons d’architecture don- Kenyon mansion was eventually converted into
nées à l’École polytechnique [Paris, 1809] and the “IBM Homestead,” where both visiting IBMers
subsequent design textbooks by figures such as and clients would be greeted by a specially trained
Auguste Choisy); certainly Le Corbusier’s dictum Guest Services Staff and could embark on a tour
that “the plan is the generator” and his eventual of the facilities. The Guest Services Staff devel-
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articulation of the Modulor proportional system oped tours designed to address visitors’ specific
are also derived from this tradition. questions; it also hosted frequent luncheons for
29 See Martin, Organizational Complex, esp. visitors with IBM managers (“IBM Poughkeepsie
chap. 2. Guest Services,” [1966], Poughkeepsie Box 49,
30 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Folder “Guest Services,” p. 4, IBM Corporate
trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Basil Archives).
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Blackwell, 1991), 326. 37 On the laboratory designs of Vorhees, Walker,

31 See Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and Foley and Smith, see Charles Haines, “Plan-
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the Pathological, 3rd expanded ed., trans. Carolyn ning the Scientific Laboratory,” in Buildings for
Fawcett (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1978), 146: “In Research, ed. Herbert L. Smith Jr. (New York: F. W.
any case the property of an object or fact, called Dodge, 1958), 3–19.
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normal in reference to an external or immanent 38 See Martin, Organizational Complex, chaps. 4

norm, is the ability to be considered, in its turn, as and 5.

252 Notes to Chapter 3

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 into the state apparatus of each country in which it Architecture and the Esthetics of Plenty (New York:
did business, from Sweden to Ethiopia. Columbia University Press, 1961), argued that “a
107 For a history of IBM’s ingratiation and technology which can achieve the thermonunclear
integration with the French military, see Jacques bomb and the moon rocket should give us a wall
Vernay, “IBM France,” Journal of Computing His- which behaves like the epidermis of the animal
tory 11, no. 4 (1989): 299–311; Henri Boucher, body—i.e. which responds actively and automati-
“Informatics in the Defense Industry,” Journal of cally to changes in its external environment. It is
Computing History 12, no. 4 (1990): 227–40; and not too difficult to imagine such a wall” (201).
Boyd France, IBM in France (New York: National 114 Robert Gatje, Marcel Breuer: A Memoir (New
Planning Association, 1961), esp. 13–32. Bakis, York: Monacelli, 2000), 99. On the IBM France
I.B.M., also documents the development of this re- laboratory at La Gaude, see ibid., 99–108; “Centre
lationship, particularly in the third part of his study, de Recherches I.B.M. La Gaude, France,” Archi-
“L’impact economique et social,” 101–70. tecture d’aujourd’hui, no. 106 (February 1963):
108 While the U.S. theme for the fair was 18–25; “Le Centre d’Études et de Recherches
“America . . . the Land and the People,” IBM oper- d’IBM-France,” Construction moderne 79, no. 3
ated under its own motto, “World Peace through (1963): 34–44; Robert F. Gatje, “Marcel Breuer’s
World Trade.” Materials on the Brussels pavilion Research Center for IBM France,” Japan Architect
and exhibits are preserved in World’s Fairs Box 3, 38 (March 1963): 12–22; “Centre de Recherches
IBM Corporate Archives. I.B.M. près de Nice,” Architecture d’aujourd’hui, no.
109 Nasrollah S. Fatemi, Gail W. Williams, and 99 (December 1961–January 1962): 28–29.
Thibaut De Saint-Phalle, eds., Multinational 115 Bakis, I.B.M., 3–4.
Corporations: The Problems and the Prospects, 116 “Binary Bounce: Endicott to La Gaude,
2nd ed. (New York: A. S. Barnes; London: Thomas France,” IBM Business Machines 45, no. 12 (De-
Yoseloff, 1976), 199; see also the remainder cember 1962): 4–5.
of chap. 7, “The Multinational Corporation and 117 The difference between the commissions
National Sovereignty.” See also “Profile of IBM further draws out the “double” nature of the Boca
World Trade.” Raton complex; while IBM indulged Breuer’s de-
110 Working drawings for the IBM World Trade sire to experiment in his design for the La Gaude
Headquarters building are preserved in the Wal- lab, RECD had no patience for his insistence on
lace K. Harrison Collection in the Miriam and Ira D. including a man-made lake with an island sculp-
Wallach Study Center, Avery Architectural and ture garden in the middle. A bitter battle ensued
Fine Arts Library, Columbia University. in correspondence between Breuer, Gatje, Noyes,
111 Gyorgy Kepes, The New Landscape of Art various RECD managers, and even Watson, much
and Science (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1956), 262. of which is preserved in Box 66, Eliot Noyes
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112 D’Arcy Thompson, On Growth and Form, Archive.

abridged ed., ed. J. T. Bonner (Cambridge: Cam- 118 Kepes, Man-Made Object. The photograph
bridge University Press, 1961), 11. of the System/360 computer is printed on 21;
113 As Christopher Alexander points out in his on the facing page is another photograph, of
essay “From a Set of Forces to a Form,” in The a “Shaker room”—clearly drawing an analogy
Man-Made Object, ed. Gyorgy Kepes (New York: between both based upon their shared blankness,
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Braziller, 1967), 96: “Forces generate form. In rationality, and order. The IBM France building ap-
the case of certain simple natural systems, this pears, twice, as an illustration for Marcel Breuer’s
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is literally true. In the case of complex, man- very short essay, “Genesis of Design,” 120–25.
made systems, it is a metaphor.” However, many 119 See Samuel Weber, “Upsetting the Setup:
architectural theorists of the curtain or membrane Remarks on Heidegger’s ‘Questing after Tech-
H IB A Q

wall during this period took this metaphor rather nics,’” in Weber, Mass Mediauras: Form Technics
more literally; for instance, James Marston Fitch, in Media (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,

257 Notes to Chapter 3

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 1996), esp. 70–75. Architekt und Organisator (Quickborn: Verlag
120 Egon Eiermann and Heinz Kuhlmann, Schnelle, 1964); and Branden Hookway, Pande-
Planungsstudie Verwaltungsgebäude am Beispeil monium: The Rise of Predatory Locales in the Post-
für die IBM-Deutschland, Projekt 2 (Stuttgart: war World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Karl Krämer, 1967). The designs from the study Press, 1999).
are also republished, with minimal commentary, in 125 Eiermann and Kuhlmann, Planungsstudie
Wulf Schirmer, ed., Egon Eiermann, 1904–1970: Verwaltungsgebäude, 66: “Für den Bauherrn
Bauten und Projekte (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags- [IBM] waren die Bau- und Betriebskosten sowie
Anstalt, 1984), 219–21. IBM and Eiermann seem die Flexibilität der Anlage entschiedend und nicht
to have established a relationship well before die Werbewirksamkeit oder der Eindruck, den
the commissioned study, as evidenced by a letter das architektonische Bild gibt.” Eiermann was not
from Eierman to the director of IBM in Sindelfin- completely foiled in his efforts to build his new
gen, a certain Perschke, dated 9 November 1964, type of skyscraper, however. In 1968 he was given
published in Egon Eiermann: Briefe des Architek- the commission to design what would be his last
ten, 1946–1970, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche building, the Olivetti offices in Frankfurt, that was
Verlags-Anstalt, 1997), 216. Four additional built using the construction system that he had
letters from Eiermann to various IBM managers developed in conjunction with Siemens-Bauunion.
are also published there, 217–20. 126 On the Stuttgart-Veihingen buildings, see
121 Eiermann and Kuhlmann, Planungsstudie Schirmer, Egon Eiermann, 1904–1970.
Verwaltungsgebäude, 7. 127 Eiermann made a relatively weak proposal
122 Ibid. The relative cost and effectiveness of for a skyscraper on the suburban site in his earli-
the proposed sun-shading mechanisms and com- est plans, all from 1967. Some of the draw-
munications, trash disposal, and air-conditioning ings are published in Schirmer, Egon Eiermann,
systems were examined in great detail, illustrated 1904–1970.
with charts and diagrams wherever relevant. In 128 Ibid., 315.
addition, the architects estimated the different 129 Lance Wright, “Factory and Offices, Havant,
construction (and maintenance) costs if the struc- Hants,” part two of a three-part article on two IBM
tures were to be built with reinforced concrete buildings in England titled “Form in the Commer-
or steel structural skeletons. Three engineers, cial Waste,” Architectural Record 151 (January
G. Lewenton, Ernst Werner, and L. Schwarz, 1972): 13–14.
contributed a brief report to the study on the rela- 130 “I.S.O. (Invisible Standing Object),” Domus,
tive efficiency of concrete and steel construction. no. 506 (January 1972): 11.
They concluded that the use of a new technique 131 Wright, “Offices, Cosham, Hants,” part three
for constructing curtain walls by “hanging” them of “Form in the Commercial Waste,” 23–24: “This
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from a steel space frame on the roof that could is not an architectural setting, but an ‘environment.’
be raised up around the building’s structural core . . . Plinth and capping are traditional definers of
by a system of cranes would result in a significant the building: their disappearance, therefore, marks
savings if the skyscraper solution were chosen. a stage in the move to make the building itself a
123 Ibid., 66: “Wenn man die aufgezeigten Vor- non-thing. Indoors, the fact that the ceiling stops
und Nachteile der beiden Entwürfe abwägt, ist short, not only of the window itself but even of the
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man als Architekt geneigt, dem Vorschlag I: Hoch- perimeter beam, adds to the feeling of insubstan-
bau den Vorrang einzuräumen. Die Klarheit in der tiality and un-dress. This is not so much a building
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funktionellen Lösung, die gute städtebauliche that we are in, but something nearer to a tent.”
Eingliederung, die Gesichtspunkte der Werbe- 132 “Least Is Most: British IBM Is the Under-
wirksamkeit und der kurzen Verkeherswege sind statement of the Year,” Architecture Plus 1, no. 6
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eindeutig.” (July 1973): 27.

124 See Eberhard Schnelle and Alfons Wankum, 133 The office of Mies van der Rohe also

258 Notes to Chapter 3

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 designed an IBM building—fittingly a tower in terns people have ever made, and because of their
Chicago—that was completed only in 1972. See intricacy they can be deciphered completely only
Rob Cuscaden, “The IBM Tower: 52 Stories of by a computer.”
Glass and Steel on a Site That Seemed ‘Almost On the development of CAD and its growing
Nonexistant,’” Inland Architect 16, no. 6 (July use in the process of design from the perspec-
1972): 9–13. tive of an architectural historian, see Robert
134 Simon Nora and Alain Minc, The Comput- Bruegmann, “The Pencil and the Electronic
erization of Society: A Report to the President of Sketchboard: Architectural Representation and
France (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980). the Computer,” in Architecture and Its Image: Four
135 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Centuries of Representation, ed. Eve Blau and
Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Edward Kaufman (Montreal: Canadian Centre for
Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Architecture; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989),
University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 6. 139–55.
136 “IBM Sponsors Space ‘Trip,’” IBM Business 139 Interview with Gordon Bruce, 2 April 2002.
Machines 42, no. 5 (May 1959): 11. The on-set designer from the Noyes office was
137 See “Calculatin’ Emmy,” IBM Business Noyes’s partner Ernest Bevilacqua. Apparently the
Machines 40, no. 5 (May 1957): 12; for an ex- designs for 2001 were convincing enough to per-
tended analysis of this film in relation to the work suade NASA to ask the Noyes office—along with
of Charles and Ray Eames, see Merrill Schleier, several other prominent industrial design firms,
Skyscraper Cinema: Architecture and Gender in such as Raymond Loewy Associates—to design
American Film (Minneapolis: University of Min- a real space station that would allow astronauts
nesota Press, 2009). to survive in space for months on end and could
138 See Friedrich A. Kittler, “There Is No Soft- generate its own rotational “gravity” via the Coreo-
ware,” in Literature, Media, Information Systems: lis effect. This project eventually became known
Essays, ed. and intro. John Johnston (Amsterdam: as Skylab. The Noyes office designs are lost; the
G+B Arts, 1997), 147: “The last historical act of only indication of their existence is on a postcard
writing may well have been the moment when, in Charles Eames sent to Noyes and his wife Molly,
the early seventies, the Intel engineers laid out 11 August 1969 (Box 81, Folder 10, “Noyes, Eliot,
some dozen square meters of blueprint paper Correspondence and printed matter, 1969–1978,
(64 square meters in the case of the later 8086) 1986, n.d.,” CRE LOC): “Pinch me! You and Molly
in order to design the hardware architecture of designing a space station—that’s fantastic!” The
their first integrated microprocessor.” Compare Loewy office designs for Skylab are published in
with Cara McCarty, Information Art: Diagramming Raymond Loewy, Industrial Design (Woodstock,
Microchips (New York: Museum of Modern Art, N.Y.: Overlook, 1979), 219–22 and the exhibition
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1990), 4: The drawings “are unique in that, unlike catalog The Designs of Raymond Loewy (Wash-
drawings of earlier logic machines, there is little ington, D.C.: Renwick Gallery of the National Col-
distinction between what is being represented lection of Fine Arts/Smithsonian Institution Press,
and the representing. They are not symbolic, but 1975), 34–36.
are multi-layered patterns of the actual circuitry, 140 Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey,
and become the template of the chip. . . . These “Millennial Edition,” based on a screenplay by
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designs were in fact not meant to be seen” (my Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke (New York:
emphasis). The artistic quality of the microchip New American Library/Penguin, 1999), 236 (al-
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thus emerges not from a symbolic character, but though this final page is, pointedly, not numbered).
rather from the representational power of pat- 141 Weber, “Upsetting the Setup,” 74.
tern, which remains fundamentally opaque: “The 142 The slogan of an advertising campaign,
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consideration of the diagrams as art derives from published in IBM Business Machines 43, no. 12
their patterning. They are the most complex pat- (December 1960): back cover.

259 Notes to Chapter 3

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6I JJ - JJ 5:I A 6I 7 J 1 C I:D
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