Florence Knoll
- Aylin Yıldırım
- 21 Mar 2016
- 2 dakikada okunur
b. Michigan, USA, 1917
Born to a baker, and orphaned at age twelve, Florence Schust grew up Saginaw, Michigan. Schust demonstrated an early interest in architecture and was enrolled at the Kingswood School for Girls, adjacent to the Cranbrook Academy of Art.
While at Kingswood, Florence befriended Eilel Saarinen, whom she would later study under at Cranbrook. Warmly embraced by the Saarinen family, Florence vacationed with them in Finland, enjoyed the company of their accomplished friends, and formed a very close relationship with Eliel’s son, Eero. The connections she made and the skills she developed while at Cranbrook were the foundations of Florence Schust’s incredible design education and pioneering career. With recommendations from Eliel Saarinen and Alvar Aalto, Florence went on to study under some of the greatest 20th century architects, including Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
As head of the Knoll Planning unit, Florence Knoll always approached furniture design with the larger space in mind. Most important to her was how a piece fit into the greater design — the room, the floor, the building. Every element of a Knoll-planned space supported the overall design and complemented the existing architecture.
Never one to compromise, Florence would often design furniture when she, “needed the piece of furniture for a job and it wasn’t there.” And while she never regarded herself as a furniture designer, her quest for harmony of space and consistency of design led her to design several of Knoll’s most iconic pieces—all simple, none plain.
As skyscrapers rose up across America during the post-war boom, Florence Knoll saw it as her job to translate the vocabulary and rationale of the modern exterior to the interior space of the corporate office. Thus, unlike Saarinen and Bertoia, her designs were architectural in foundation, not sculptural. She scaled down the rhythm and details of modern architecture while humanizing them through color and texture. Her lounge collection, designed in 1954, is a perfect example of her restrained, geometric approach to furniture, clearly derived from her favorite mentor, Mies van der Rohe.
The elegant 2480 Pedestal Table Desk, introduced in 1961, exudes executive quality and epitomizes Mies van der Rohe’s impact on Florence’s approach to design. Each detail was endlessly refined to achieve simple, seemingly effortless beauty. Knoll Development Group member Vincent Cafiero: “She had an ability to see. I remember working with her on the base of the table, and we were talking about fractions of an inch — 16ths and 32nds of a taper — just to get it absolutely right.” Despite being conceived for the office, the table has found itself in many dining rooms over the last fifty years.
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