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Designer Spotlight: Florence Knoll
designer spotlight
florence knoll
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This design pioneer is best known for defining the aesthetic of the high-end, modern office, creating bold and efficient interiors.
When it comes to the achievements of Florence Knoll,
the word “extraordinary” seems like the best choice of words. She was a woman in a male-dominated industry, yet rose to financial and artistic success, and was the genius behind Knoll, considered one of the most important design companies of the 20th century.
When she died at age 101, in January of 2019, The New York Times reported in her obituary that her mid-20th-century designs are “the essence of the genre’s clean, functional forms. Transcending design fads, they are still influential, still contemporary, still common in offices, homes and public spaces, still found in dealers’ showrooms and represented in museum collections.”
FROM ORPHAN TO DESIGN EXECUTIVE
Knoll was born as Florence Schust in Saginaw, Michigan in 1917. Sadly, by age 12 she was already an orphan. She attended a girls’ school called Kingswood, then Cranbrook Academy of Art—a pre-eminent destination for learning art, architecture and design. She also studied at the Architectural Association
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in London and the Illinois Institute of Technology. Her teachers and mentors include Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius and Eliel Saarinen, a Finnish architect who fathered her friend, the architect and industrial designer Eero Saarinen. (For a profile of Saarinen, see the Summer 2021 issue of Kardiel Modern Home.)
By 1941, Schust had moved to New York City to work, and in 1946, she married Hans Knoll, a member of a prominent furniture-making family. The two formed Knoll Associates, where Florence was design director from 1946 to 1965. Knoll Associates grew into a worldwide empire, with showrooms in the U.S. and abroad offer-
ing furniture, textiles and accessories. Florence Knoll also formed the influential Knoll Planning Unit in 1946, the interior planning arm of Knoll, and is credited with inventing something we now take for granted: the fabric swatch.
Hans Knoll died in a car accident while in Cuba in 1955, and Florence Knoll became president of their company. She later stepped down from that position in 1960 so that she could focus on design and product development. Florence married banker Harry Hood Bassett in 1958, and by 1965, left the Knoll company. She lived in Florida and ran her private architecture and design practice.
PHOTOS: Florence Knoll Basset papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
Left: Florence Knoll at work in 1956, the year after her husband Hans tragically died and she took the helm as president of Knoll Associates. Center: Eero Saarinen was a longtime friend of Florence Knoll’s and they collaborated to produce some of the Mid-Century’s best known product designs. Right: Florence Knoll, holding her own in an industry that was very male-dominated.
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THE KNOLL LOOK
“Simply put, the Knoll look defines a modern interior that includes sculptural seating furniture combined with other more neutral furnishings, and complemented by humanizing elements, such as rugs and plants,” says Ana Araujo, PhD. Araujo is an architect, teacher and researcher, and is the author of the new book, No Compromise: The Work of Florence Knoll (see sidebar). This modern interior, Araujo notes, was first conceived of by Florence Knoll as a student, “when she designed her own dormitory at the Cranbrook Art School. It included a chair by her close friend Eero Saarinen, a wall tapestry hand-woven by Knoll herself, plants and neutral furniture for storage. The Knoll look combines the Bauhaus aesthetics with the softer and warmer Scandinavian modernist language. In its origins, it was mostly associated with working environments in the U.S. while in the rest of the world it was widely disseminated in the domestic realm.”
Knoll Associates collaborated with architects and designers, encouraging them to create visionary, original products. Florence Knoll brought in design concepts from her friends, including Mies van der Rohe (the Barcelona Chair) and Eero Saarinen (the Pedestal Table, and Womb Chair, for example).
Knoll created designs for some of the best-known companies in the U.S., such as General Motors, IBM, Seagram, H.J. Heinz and CBS. Prior to her influence, offices featured heavy décor, such as giant mahogany desks. She showed bigwigs that a neutral, simple space did not diminish their professionalism. For CBS’s 52nd Street headquarters, dubbed “Black Rock,” she designed the 1,000-plus offices, from fabric wallcoverings to door handles and down to the ash trays. Knoll preferred open spaces, with tables for employees to collaborate—concepts that are familiar to workers in hipster offices today.
“I think she did invent the modern office,” says Oscar Fitzgerald Ph.D. Fitzgerald is a nationally known historian, author, lecturer, and consultant. His latest book, American Furniture Designers 1900-2020, is forthcoming from Rowman and Littlefield. “The idea of the Knoll Planning Unit. Instead of only selling furniture, she would say, ‘I will design your whole environment, desk, chairs, everything you need.’ I think she and Herman Miller were the prime promoters of Modernism. You can’t pin it down and say she started it all but she certainly promoted it. Miller and Knoll designs were both sold widely.”
Florence Knoll created her own furniture designs, too. “She was very modest about her own stuff,” says Fitzgerald. “It’s simple and linear, very angular.” Florence Knoll referred to her own designs as “meat and potatoes,” yet many,
including the Florence Knoll Hairpin Stacking Table (first introduced in 1948 as the Model 75 stacking stool) and marble-topped dining table (early 1960s), are still produced. Knoll’s original work is on display at the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, at Paris’ Musée des Arts Décoratifs, and in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
MAKING HER MARK
“Florence Knoll created a highly original design language,” says Araujo. “There was so much going on around her, and she was, in many ways, unfazed by it all: she was ‘doing her own thing’. She knew how to create a look that was exciting but also subtle and sophisticated.”
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KARDIEL FURNITURE SHOWN HERE
Florence 89" Leather Sofa in Cognac • E-Gray Adjustable Side Tables in Chrome • Tripod 36" Fabric Chair in Neptune Velvet
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PHOTO: Florence Knoll Basset papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
In 1959, Art Metal Construction Co., a large manufacturer of desks and filing cabinets, bought Knoll Associates, Knoll International and Knoll Textiles. Florence Knoll remained president of the three organizations. Kardiel Florence 89" Leather Sofa, in Cognac
Kardiel Florence Leather Chair and Ottoman, in Night leather
Araujo notes that Knoll was bold in her interiors, but unassuming when it came to her furniture designs. “Emphasizing her role as a designer of interiors rather than of furniture was also a diplomatic choice. It enabled [Florence] Knoll to avoid competition or confrontation with her male mentors and colleagues, most of whom ventured into furniture design but remained removed from the field of interiors, which was largely marginalized for its association with the feminine.”
Perhaps it’s time to reassess Florence Knoll’s role as a furniture designer. “The pieces she created were certainly more subdued and less flashy than the designs of her male colleagues, but they were nonetheless very well thought through and had qualities that we are today perhaps better prepared to assimilate,” says Araujo. “An evidence of this is that much of Florence Knoll’s furniture is still in production, just like the other classics which, according to her, had more design caliber than her ‘meat and potatoes’ works.”
BREAKING THE GLASS CEILING
At a time when design was overwhelmingly a male business—the historical images of Knoll generally feature her surrounded by a tableful of men—what was it about Florence Knoll that allowed her to succeed?
“It was a combination of chance, talent and resourcefulness,” says Araujo. “Her close relationship with the Saarinens, facilitated by her having joining Cranbrook as a teenage orphan, certainly helped. It is interesting to remember that Knoll was the only girl in her class who chose to pursue architecture for a career. Maybe the other girls, who most likely had a more conventional upbringing, were more aware of the difficulties facing a woman who was willing to pick this path. Knoll was also very committed from an early age, and she knew how to make the most of the opportunities that were given to her.”
STEPPING BACK
Florence Knoll decided to retire from the Knoll company at only 48, when her career was at a peak, says Araujo. “Reading through her interviews, one gets the sense that maybe she felt she didn’t have as much agency as she would have liked (although she never states this clearly). This is hardly surprising considering that the world she operated in was entirely ruled by a status quo that privileged a male-centric way of thinking. Florence Knoll might have been able to face up to this reality, especially after she had achieved recognition, but she decided not to. Perhaps she wasn’t able to articulate clearly where her discomfort lied, perhaps she lacked the courage to confront people and legacies that had played such a seminal role in her trajectory.”
Knoll may have felt more at ease in her later work in her own practice. “In her last designs, Florence Knoll worked with a much freer de-
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sign language than the one she developed while working for her company,” says Araujo. “She played with different design legacies, which included the modern, the vernacular, the historical. Perhaps more importantly, she did this in a way that feels natural, sincere, unorthodox and unaffected.”
KNOLL’S LEGACY
Knoll was also the first woman to win a Gold Medal for Industrial Design from the American Institute of Architects, in 1961. Forty-one years later, she was a recipient of the National Medal of Arts. When she died, Knoll left an enormous design legacy. “The idea of a unified plan for an interior and promoting modernism in general, the modern materials, eliminating extraneous decoration,” Fitzgerald says. “She had a huge impact.”
Kardiel Florence Chair
NO COMPROMISE
Ana Araujo, PhD’s new biography, No Compromise: The Work of Florence Knoll, came out this summer from Princeton Architectural Press and was an immediate best-seller in design books. Araujo is a practicing architect and teaches at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. “The Knoll aesthetic is so widely disseminated that we seem to know it almost by osmosis,” she says. “With that said, there was some fascinating anecdotal information I came across, which reminds us of how risky and innovative Florence Knoll’s approach was in her time. For example, when her company opened its first showroom in Paris, it was so different from what was around that people didn’t understand what they were selling. Some thought they were florists. It is inspiring to see how the Knolls, following their instinct, managed to build such a robust brand.”
No Compromise: The Work of Florence Knoll, by Ana Araujo, PhD. Published in June 2021, from Princeton Architectural Press.
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