The History of Knoll: The American Edition of Modernism
Knoll played a large part in how Americans discovered modernism. Founded in New York in the late 1930s, the house brought together within a generation designers whose pieces remain landmarks of twentieth-century furniture: Mies van der Rohe, Harry Bertoia, Eero Saarinen, Warren Platner. Its history is also that of a couple, Hans and Florence Knoll, and of a way of thinking about object, space and industry together.
Hans Knoll and the 1938 founding
The house was born in 1938, when Hans Knoll opened the Hans G. Knoll Furniture Company in a small space in New York. He already knew the trade: he came from a German family of furniture makers, and his father, Walter Knoll, was among the makers of modern furniture in pre-war Germany. Hans arrived in the United States intending to import European models, but the import difficulties of the late 1930s led him to produce locally.
Rather than follow prevailing taste, Hans set out to bring the rigour of European modernism to an American market still dominated by historical styles. In 1941 he brought in the Danish designer Jens Risom, whose early series set the tone: clean lines, simple materials, economy of means.
Florence Knoll and the Planning Unit
The arrival of Florence Schust changed the company's course. She joined in 1943 and married Hans in 1946. Trained as an architect, she studied under Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology after training at Cranbrook with Eliel Saarinen, and Florence Knoll brought a vision of space that went well beyond making chairs.
In 1945 she launched the Knoll Planning Unit, an interior planning service that rethought the layout of corporate offices. The idea was to treat an office floor as a full architectural project, in which furniture, circulation, textiles and light followed the same logic. It was in this context that a textile division, Knoll Textiles, was created in 1947 to supply the fabrics for these interiors. Florence designed many pieces herself, tables, desks and benches, which she modestly called "fill-in pieces" and which are among the most pared-down in Knoll's output.
The Mies van der Rohe licence
The agreement with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe did a great deal for Knoll's identity. Florence's former teacher, Mies had left Germany and was running the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Around the turn of the 1940s and 1950s, he granted Knoll the rights to manufacture his furniture: the Barcelona collection, the Brno chair, the MR series. The Barcelona chair and stool, designed in 1929 for the German pavilion at the Barcelona International Exposition, thus became a lasting part of the Mies van der Rohe catalogue at Knoll.
This licence changed the scale of the house. It placed Knoll in the direct line of the Bauhaus and gave it a historical legitimacy few competitors could claim. The Barcelona chair became one of the most recognisable seats of the twentieth century.
Bertoia, Saarinen, Platner
Knoll also turned to a new generation of designers. In 1948 Eero Saarinen designed the Womb Chair, an enveloping moulded-shell armchair meant for curling up in, far from the upright posture of traditional seating. He followed it with the Pedestal series and the Tulip chair of 1957, in which he set out to remove what he called the "slum of legs" under tables and chairs by setting seat and top on a single central base.
In 1952 Harry Bertoia presented his collection of welded steel wire seating, including the Diamond Chair. A sculptor as much as a designer, Bertoia worked steel wire as a material that draws in space: his chairs are, in his own phrase, "mainly made of air".
In 1966 Warren Platner created the collection that bears his name, made of hundreds of steel rods bent and welded into sheaves. Platner wanted to bring back into modernism a degree of ornament he associated with period styles, without giving up industrial logic. Each piece requires a very large number of welds, which makes it one of the most demanding productions in the catalogue.
Knoll's place in American modernism
After Hans Knoll died in a car accident in 1955, Florence took over the company, consolidated its identity, then gradually withdrew from the end of the 1950s. She left behind a way of conceiving modernism as a whole in which chair, textile, desk and architecture answer one another. Knoll did not invent the forms of European modernism: the house produced them, industrialised them and spread them across a continent, adding its own designs along the way.
An early Knoll piece therefore carries the mark of both a designer and a manufacturer. To place it in this history, you need to be able to read its marking, a subject we cover in our guide to maker labels and stamps and in our vintage Knoll buying guide.
What we check
When a Knoll piece comes through our hands, we identify the designer and model, estimate the production generation from the Knoll marking and construction details, and describe the condition of the shell, base, chrome or leather.
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