Cooper Hewitt says...
Born in Michigan in 1917, Florence Knoll (née Schust) occupied a central position in the development of mid-century design in the United States. Advocating for the importance of interiors in the architectural design process, she significantly developed the field of interior design and pioneered a humanized form of modernism.
Born to a family of prosperous bakers and entrepreneurs but orphaned by the age of twelve, Knoll’s education and career exhibits a remarkable tenacity. She followed a focused path of architectural education and established an extensive network of designers. A student at Kingswood and then at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Eliel Saarinen’s architecture course, Knoll was brought into contact with Saarinen’s human-centered approach to design and developed a close relationship with him and his family. In 1935, after a year at Cranbrook, she enrolled in Columbia University’s School of Architecture, however, couldn’t return in the fall of 1936 due to surgery. In 1938, she enrolled in the Architecture Association school in London after hearing Alvar Aalto speak highly of the institution, but the onset of WWII in September 1939 brought Knoll back to the United States. She worked briefly as an apprentice for Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer in Cambridge, however, by fall of 1940, she had enrolled at the Illinois Institute of Technology where Mies van der Rohe was teaching his rationalist design approach. Knoll graduated as an Architect in 1941.
Working to expand the limited design roles open to women at this time, Knoll began to carve out a space for herself through defining and promoting the professionalization of interior design. In 1941, she met the charismatic Hans Knoll while designing a New York showroom for his then-titled, Hans G Knoll Furniture Company, and they married in 1946, starting Knoll Associates together. Heading up the prolific Knoll Planning Unit, she designed office interiors in response to the post-war economic boom in the US and developed her ‘paste-up’ technique that presented a bird’s-eye view of the materials and treatments of an interior scheme. In 1952-54, she landed a breakthrough project to design the offices of the Columbia Broadcasting System, that although small in scale, catapulted the business’ reputation. She was instrumental in inviting many international designers such as Eero Saarinen, Harry Bertoia, Pierre Jeanerette and Mies van der Rohe to design and produce with Knoll Associates. Knoll created her own furniture designs, which she humbly characterized as “fill-in-pieces", stating, “I designed sofas because no one was designing sofas”[1]. Her designs adopted the stylistic influences of modernism in their proportion and sleek geometry, but they fundamentally emphasized utility by serving the needs of interior spaces and their inhabitants.
In 1955 Hans Knoll died in a car crash and Florence Knoll remarried to Harry Hood Bassett in 1958, becoming Florence Knoll Bassett. She sold Knoll Associates in 1959 to Art Metal and resigned as the Director in 1965, not before receiving an AIA Gold Medal in 1961. After resigning at the height of her career, she lived privately until her death in 2019 and received a National Medal of Arts in 2002.
[1] “Celebrating a Century of Florence Knoll,” Knoll, accessed 29 October, 2024, https://www.knoll.com/knollnewsdetail/introducing-florence-knoll-centennial-designs.
