Florence Knoll passed away on Friday at the age of 101. [Photos: courtesy Knoll]
Florence Knoll Bassett, the brilliant and influential architect, designer, and businesswoman who built the design and furniture studio Knoll into an icon of midcentury design and whom the New York Times in 1964 called “today the single most powerful figure in the field of modern design,” passed away at the age of 101 on Friday.
Though she worked over a half century ago, many of the issues of Knoll’s time–from gender parity to the design of the modern workplace–are still under discussion in 2019. She was an architect in a field dominated by men. She collaborated with and popularized design by the likes of Mies van der Rohe, Anni Albers, Harry Bertoia, and Eero Saarinen. She defied the idea that interior design was a lesser form of design. She was a believer in research, emerging technology, and mock-ups, and convinced some of the most powerful companies in America to invest in ideas that had their roots in the Bauhaus principles of humanism and rationality.
Her work feels particularly current today, when a new generation of technology companies are working to “optimize” every last square inch of their offices and women are, still, fighting for equity at work.
OFFICES FOR PEOPLE, AND “EQUIPMENT FOR LIVING”
Knoll is often cited as the originator of open plan offices, but that meant something very different in the 1940s than it does today. At the time, corporate offices were designed to broadcast the weight and power of their tenants: “Once upon a time virtually every big business executive thought–or whoever did his thinking for him on such matters thought–that his office had to have pale green walls and that his heavy, drawers‐to‐the‐floor desk had to be placed cater‐cornered,” the New York Times recalled in the 1960s.
When she married Hans Knoll and became a partner in his fledgling furniture company in 1946, Knoll pioneered a new approach to interior design with the Knoll Planning Unit, a team of designers who applied the International Style’s rationality and planning-based approach to corporate interiors. She believed that the ideas behind modernism should be applied to interior design, too: “‘Interior decorators’ of the time, had no knowledge of modern architecture–or, if they had, they were generally out of sympathy with it.”
Knoll, on the other hand, was a working architect who had studied with and worked for modern luminaries like Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius. “Many of the designs that [Hans] had at that time were ones that I did not approve of. I felt they were too romantic and didn’t quite fit in with my ideas,” she said of joining Knoll in the 1940s. “The Planning Unit existed because of my background in architecture. It was the very first furniture company [that] ever had a planning department. This came from my special interests.”
With the Planning Unit, she created flexible office spaces that were based on empirical research–unheard of at the time. “This was arrived at through a series of interviews with both executives and clerical staff, designed to evaluate a client’s true needs,” write Cherie and Kenneth Fehrman in Interior Design Innovators 1910-1960. “Today, this is a standard industry practice, but in the mid-1940s, it was revolutionary.”
Based on that analysis, the team would produce models, prototypes, and full-scale mock-ups. Her designs often included movable walls, plenty of glass to usher natural light into the depths of large floor plates, greenery, and textiles to created visual interest and noise dampening. Unlike the warehouse-like offices commonly called “open” today, her offices were calm, efficient spaces filled with light, texture, and variation.