The AA is deeply saddened to learn of the passing of former AA student Florence Knoll who died on 25 January 2019 aged 101.
This obituary is written by Dr Ana Araujo (AA Unit Master) who is currently working on a book on Florence Knoll, as part of an ongoing research on the contribution of women to the field of architecture and design.
One of the strongest memories of her childhood, she recalled, was looking at blueprints on her father’s desk: ‘They seemed enormous to a five year old, but nonetheless, I was enchanted by them’. This was 1922, the same year Frederick E. Schust passed away. Perhaps out of an unconscious desire to honour this special moment, Florence Knoll (née Schust) would, some ten years later, stand out as the only girl in her class to choose architecture as a profession. By this time her mother had also died, and she had become a boarding student at Cranbrook (Detroit), an educational community led by celebrated Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen.
Her career had an early start. She designed her first house age fifteen (including ‘plans, elevations, models and interiors’). Eliel Saarinen would come by every now and then to give her advice; textile designer Loja, Eliel’s wife, helped with the furnishings; and their son Eero, at the time a student at Yale University, taught Florence lessons in architectural history illustrated with his own sketches. Virtually adopted by the family, Florence often travelled with the Saarinens to their summer house in Finland, Hvittrask, and to various other places in Europe and around the world. In one of these trips she met Alvar Aalto, who advised her to enrol at the AA for her formal architectural training. Florence spent three years in London, but had to precociously interrupt her studies and go back to the US because of the war. Upon her return, she took a one-year internship in the office of Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer before finishing her studies at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where she would meet future collaborator Mies van der Rohe.
After graduation Florence moved to New York, and started freelancing for various architectural firms. ‘Being the only female’, she remembered, ‘I was assigned to the few interiors required’. While working for Harrison, Abramovitz and Fouilhoux, she met Hans Knoll. Recently arrived from Europe, and being part of a dynasty of German furniture manufacturers, Hans had just launched his own furniture company, with the mission of introducing the new modernist trends to the US market. He and Florence soon started an informal collaboration (Florence would help with the interior projects), and by 1946 she had become Hans’s partner in business and in life, acting as director of design at Knoll Associates. Her vision for the company was bold and ambitious. It was under Florence’s influence that the Knolls would commission furniture pieces from designers such as Harry Bertoia, Mies van der Rohe and her old friend Eero Saarinen. She played a crucial role in promoting the work of these and of many other designers, today considered to be amongst the most iconic of the twentieth century. Florence was also an accomplished furniture designer herself, even though she humbly described her work as a mere complement to the standout pieces of her male colleagues.
As the design director of Knoll Associates, Florence was also in charge of supervising Knoll Textiles, a division which revolutionised the field of furnishing interiors, adapting it to the functional demands and aesthetic vision of the modern world (she is also known to have invented the practice of folding a piece of cardboard around a cut of three-inch square fabrics and stapling them together as a means to create a textile sample).
Notwithstanding all the above-mentioned deeds, some consider that Florence Knoll’s most important contribution to the field of design was achieved not through her work with furniture or textiles but through the Knoll Planning Unit – the division of Knoll Associates in charge of interiors. With Hans’s cunning business skills, the Rockefellers were amongst their first clients. ‘It was sort of starting at the top’, as she used to say. Other prestigious commissions included offices for IBM, CBS, General Motors, Heinz, and many others. With the Planning Unit Florence proposed a whole new methodology for working with interiors. She followed a rigorous design method, producing a style which became known as ‘humanized modernism’: the combination of an extremely effective and economical use of space – customized to the specific needs of the client – with the creation of a warm, refined atmosphere, highlighted by the inclusion of plants, textiles and artworks.
When the work of Knoll Associates reached a peak in the mid 1950s, Hans Knoll tragically died in a car accident in Havana, Cuba, while overseeing a Planning Unit scheme for the American Embassy. Florence assumed the direction of the company, staying in this position until her early retirement, age 48, in 1965. By 1958 Florence had remarried. She met her second husband Harry Hood Bassett, a banker from Miami, while working on a project for him. Following her retirement in 1965, Florence relocated to Florida and led a relatively quiet life. She did a few other projects, mostly residential, which, interestingly, display a softer design idiom than the one she employed while working at Knoll.
Florence was the recipient many design and architectural awards, including the National Medal of Arts, the American Institute of Architects’ Industrial Design Gold Medal and the Red Dot Design Award. Her colleagues remember her for her extreme precision, unparalleled sense of style and for her relentless pursuit of the highest standards in everything she did. Acclaimed by The New York Times in 1964 as ‘the single most powerful figure in the field of modern design’, Florence Knoll’s contribution remains ubiquitous, yet to a great degree unacknowledged. It is our hope that she will in the near future come to occupy the place she deserves in our history.
