Florence Knoll helped create, and for a time ran. Knoll Furniture with an elegant steeliness that contrasted with her adorable looks and nickname. She assisted in bringing into form some of the most enduring design products of modernist luminaries like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Isamu Noguchi, Eero Saarinen and Marcel Breuer, at the same time producing singular interiors and furniture of her own. Her achievements would have been remarkable for anyone, but for a woman in postwar corporate America they were extraordinary. Florence Knoll Bassett was born Florence Schust in Saginaw, Mich., in 1917. Orphaned at age 12 by the death of her mother Mina whom her father, Frederick Schust, died when she was 5, Florence was taken in hand by a guardian who guided her to select a girls’ boarding school. The guardian fatefully chose the Kingswood School, part of the Cranbrook Educational Community, in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., which was presided over by the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen. With his textile-designer wife Loja, Saarinen recognized Shu’s talent and brought her under the wing of their family. Cranbrook presented a holistic approach to design that Florence carried forth with her. At Kingswood, she designed her first house, conceptually complete in every detail, at age 14. She continued her study of architecture at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, at the Architectural Association in London, and at ITT in Chicago. In 1943 she was working for Harrison and Abromovitz Architects in New York when she met Hans Knoll, a furniture manufacturer. She went to work for Knoll and began the Knoll Planning Unit, a design group within the company that would set the standard for interior space-planning practices. She married Hans Knoll in 1946 and the company became Knoll Associates. She designed furniture when the existing pieces in the Knoll collection only didn't meet her needs. Almost half of the furniture pieces in the Knoll collection were her designs including tables, desks, chairs, sofas, benches and stools. She designed furniture not only to be functional but also to designate the way she wanted the interior space to function as well as relate to the architecture of the space and the overall composition. This was inevitably part of her concept of "total design" in which she aspires to work in a broad range of design fields including architecture, manufacturing, interior design, textiles, graphics, advertising and presentation. Warmed through color and texture, the Florence Sofa is a scaled-down translation of the rhythm and proportions of mid-century modern architecture. With a spare, geometric profile an expression of the rational design approach Florence Knoll learned from her mentor, Mies van der Rohe the Florence sofa is utterly modern and totally timeless.
As an architect, Knoll's most famous creations are the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company Headquarters building in Bloomfield, Connecticut and the interior of the CBS Building in New York City. Her vision for the new office was clean and uncluttered, and the corporate boom of the 1960s provided the perfect opportunity for her to change the way people looked at work in their offices. Her open-plan layouts were clean, uncluttered spaces. She retired as Knoll president in 1960 but remained with the company as the director of design until 1965 when she retired completely. In 2002, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts and she turned 100 in May 2017.
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In the year 1928, sketches for the Barcelona Chair first appeared alongside with other seating solutions which Mies was experimenting with at the time. Inspired by classical forms, the Barcelona Chair’s basic, scissor-shape design (curule seat) dates back to 1500 BC. A reprised form, examples of the curule seat have been found in Egyptian, Greek and Roman designs throughout history, often with strong connections to seats of power. Such is the iconic status of the Barcelona chair that it has its own page in the Barcelona Yellow Pages and furthermore, it is one of the oldest modern classics still around. It was designed in 1929 for the Spanish Royal Family by a German designer named Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. For that, Mies is regarded as a pioneer of modern furniture. His style was deceptively simple with clean lines and he used modern materials such as stainless steel and plate glass in his builds, which he referred to as "skin and bones" architecture. He came up with a set of pioneering designs in the search for a style that would be suitable for the modern industrial age. While many of his ideas remained unbuilt, in 1929 he was asked to design the German Pavilion for the Barcelona Exposition. As part of his design, he made two chairs for King Alfonso XIII and his wife Ena, in case they required a rest while visiting. Aware that King Alfonso XIII would be in attendance, Mies also famously said that the Barcelona Chair would be "fit for a king," giving way to the misconception Barcelona Chair was designed as a monarchic object an idea since largely discredited by scholars. According to the aforementioned Yellow Pages, Mies drew his inspiration from an Egyptian folding chair and a Roman folding stool. It was supposed to project throne. Unfortunately, the royal couple never sat in the pavilion. The following year, he was appointed director of the Bauhaus school until 1933, when it was shut down by the Nazis. Four years later, he moved to the United States and eventually became an American citizen. Originally made for display, only two iterations of the Barcelona Chair were specifically designed for the Barcelona Pavilion. Through their incorporation, Mies sought a formal a solution to accompany the free-standing walls and planes of the Barcelona Pavilion, intended to symbolize the new progressive spirit of the Weimar Republic. Mies said that the design had to be more than a chair, but “a monumental object. As organizational elements, the chairs and accompanying ottomans were positioned throughout the pavilion as fixed pieces which Mies intended for them to remain in place.
After a drawn out process, Knoll successfully obtained a federal trade dress protection for five pieces designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, including the Germany Barcelona Chair and Ottoman, in 2004. Trade dress protects the “total visual image” of a product, affording the recipient with stewardship of the product in the marketplace. The measure has been essential to protecting Mies’ designs from inelegant, unauthorized copying. |
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June 2019
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