PurplePrice Mag · · 3 min read
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Knoll is the American company that brought European modernism into the offices and homes of the United States. Its catalogue includes some of the most famous furniture of the 20th century: Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona chair, Eero Saarinen's Tulip chair, Harry Bertoia's steel wire seating and Marcel Breuer's Wassily chair. More than forty of its pieces are in the collection of MoMA.
Hans and Florence
Hans Knoll, born in Stuttgart in 1914 into a family of furniture makers, moved to New York and founded his company there in 1938. There he met Florence Schust, a young architect who had grown up at the Cranbrook Academy of Art alongside the Saarinen family and had studied under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in Chicago. Florence began working with Hans and in 1946 they married: the company became Knoll Associates. Florence created the Knoll Planning Unit, an in-house studio that designed entire offices for large American corporations, with coordinated furniture, textiles and colours, and she herself designed sofas, tables and desks with rigorous lines.
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The masters' furniture
The Knolls brought in architect and artist friends. Eero Saarinen designed the Womb chair (1948), an enveloping shell conceived, at Florence's request, for curling up in, and then the Tulip chair and table (1956), with a single central foot to get rid of what he called the “slum of legs” under tables: a masterpiece of Organic design. The sculptor Harry Bertoia, who moved to Pennsylvania in 1950 at the Knolls' invitation, created the series of steel mesh chairs that includes the Diamond chair, whose success later allowed him to devote himself entirely to sculpture. In 1953 Knoll obtained the exclusive rights to Mies van der Rohe's furniture, including the Barcelona chair designed with Lilly Reich for the German pavilion at the 1929 Barcelona Exhibition. Later the furniture of Breuer, a master of the Bauhaus, also entered the catalogue.
After Hans
In 1955 Hans Knoll died in a car crash in Cuba, aged only 41. Florence took over the company and made it a world reference for office furniture and the International Style. In the following years designers such as Lella and Massimo Vignelli, Frank Gehry, with his woven bentwood chairs, Gae Aulenti and Richard Sapper worked for Knoll. The company has factories in the United States and in Italy, at Foligno and Graffignana. In 2021 it was acquired by Herman Miller, the historic rival that made the furniture of the Eameses: together they now form the MillerKnoll group.
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