Knoll
KNOLL - MorningCalM AUGUST 2019
THE MODERN CENTURY
They say that time flies, but not at Knoll. Since 1938, the American brand has been defining the aesthetic of modern offices with furniture designed by the world’s most visionary architects.
The TV show Mad Men, set in a New York advertising agency in the 1960s, was praised for its character-driven writing throughout its seven seasons. Yet the spell it cast wouldn’t have been so potent without the production design, which made the golden age of advertising appear irresistibly chic and self-assured. Its sets featured classic pieces made by Knoll, the design brand that practically invented the look of the modern American office.
Founded by Hans Knoll in 1938, the company tapped into the demand for modern office furniture that came with the increasing prevalence of office jobs. The first half of the 20th century saw enormous changes in working life in the United States; this was when the term “white-collar worker” entered the common parlance.
In 1943, Hans met Florence Schust, who later became Florence Knoll. She was a trained architect in a time when it was a given that women would keep houses, not design them. While studying at the Illinois Institute of Technology, she was mentored by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe — the last director of the Bauhaus, who had left Germany in 1937 after an unsuccessful fight to reopen the school following accusations that its teachings were subversive. Though Mies maintained that the Bauhaus wasn’t political, Modernism certainly looked radical. It tolerated no ornamentation; it championed honesty above all, striving to lay bare both the structure and function of a space.
This spare aesthetic found disciples all over the world — the movement wasn’t called the International Style for nothing — and when Florence joined Knoll, she brought her own dash of radicalism, designing furniture and interiors with an architectural eye so that they were extensions of the building itself. Just as Modernist architecture built new cities, her furniture sought to reshape the corporate world. She embraced the open office plan, creating designs that would foster interaction and break down hierarchies. Pieces like the Oval High Table deviated from the conventional rectangular shape of meeting tables, its absence of hard angles encouraging colleagues to casually gather around it.
Thanks to Florence’s guiding vision, Knoll has made a habit of working with renowned architects and artists who think big and design with simplicity. Eero Saarinen, the architect of the TWA Flight Center at John F Kennedy Airport in New York and the Gateway Arch in St Louis, Missouri, used his gift with elegant curves to design the fluid Tulip chair for Knoll. The multidisciplinary artist Harry Bertoia created a famous set of wire chairs.
Knoll today is a truly international design firm, with dealers around the world. It continues to work with the best contemporary architects and keeps an eye on how our work habits are currently changing. Its more recent introductions include ergonomic chairs that bring comfort to the long nine-to-five workday, as well as height- adjustable tables and desks.
At its core, Knoll values timelessness over hasty updates that might quickly betray a bygone era. The brand has acquired the rights to produce some of the most enduring examples of modern furniture, including the iconic Barcelona chair, whose elegant folded shape was designed by Mies and Lilly Reich in 1929. Today it’s manufactured exclusively by Knoll, and several steps are completed by hand.
Modernism exalts clean design partly as a means of being of the moment — not looking nostalgically at the past or projecting toward the future, but attempting to define “now” on its own terms. Maybe this was what made the ’60s a fitting backdrop for Mad Men: it was an era obsessed with its own transformative moment. The show’s characters are acutely aware that they’re living through unprecedented times — just as people are today. Modernity is forever a present-tense affair, and Knoll has known this since its founding eight decades ago. On the eve of yet another decade, its classics still blend seamlessly into contemporary living and working spaces, as if not a day has passed at all.