https://www.interiordesign.net/articles/15950-florence-knoll-bassett-pioneer-of-american-office-design-dies-at-101/



American designer Florence Knoll Bassett passed away on January 25, 2018 in Coral Cables, Florida. She was 101.

David E. Bright, spokesman for Knoll Inc., announced her passing. Knoll Bassett and her husband Hans Knoll ran the company for many years together, beginning in the 1940s. She had a large hand in the creative vision of Knoll, started the Knoll Planning Unit, and directed the design of the company’s iconic furniture, textiles, and graphics.

Knoll Bassett studied under Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, and collaborated with Isamu Noguchi and Alexander Girard, among others, during a pivotal time in the development of American Modern design.

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In 1961, Knoll Bassett became the first woman recipient of the Gold Medal for Industrial Design from AIA. In 2003, she received the highest award for artistic excellence in America, the National Medal of Arts.

Florence Marguerite Knoll Bassett (née Schust; May 24, 1917 – January 25, 2019) was an American architect and furniture designer who studied under Mies van der Rohe and Eliel Saarinen. She was born Florence Schust in Saginaw, Michigan, and was known in familiar circles as "Shu".

She graduated from the Kingswood School before studying at the Cranbrook Academy of Art (both institutions are located on the same campus in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan). Knoll also received a bachelor's degree in architecture from the Armour Institute (now Illinois Institute of Technology) in 1941 and briefly worked with leaders of the Bauhaus movement, including Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and the American modernist, Wallace K. Harrison.

Knoll Furniture
In 1938, Hans Knoll founded his furniture company by that name in New York City. In 1943, Florence Schust convinced Knoll she could help bring in business to his company even in America's wartime economy by expanding into interior design by working with architects. With her architectural background and design flair, she succeeded. They married in 1946, she became a full business partner and together they founded Knoll Associates. A new furniture factory was established in East Greenville, Pennsylvania, and dealers of Knoll's furniture were carefully added over the next several years.

Knoll felt architects should contribute their design ability to furniture as well. Some of these furniture designs would become design icons of the 20th century and have remained in the Knoll line for decades due to their timeless design. When Hans Knoll died in a car accident in 1955, Florence Knoll took over operation of the company. She designed chairs, sofas, tables and casegoods during the 1950s, many of which remain in the Knoll line to this day. In 1958 she married Harry Hood Bassett, the son of Harry H. Bassett. In the 1950s her work was often included in The Museum of Modern Art's "Good Design" exhibits. Although Knoll did a great deal of residential work, she worked in the International Style that was especially successful in corporate offices.

As an architect, Knoll's most famous creations are the interior of Connecticut General Life Insurance Company Headquarters building in Bloomfield, Connecticut and again 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. She turned 100 in May 2017.

In an interview with the New York Times in 1964, she clarified "I am not a decorator... the only place I decorate is my own house." She took a stance to further differentiate the titles of an interior decorator and an interior designer. Knoll was one of the first to make this differentiation, frustrated at the title of interior decorator especially in its common use towards women. Her expertise in furniture design and architecture exceed the common skill of an 'interior decorator'. This embodies the Goals of the Knoll Planning Unit.

Furniture
Knoll stated that she was not a furniture designer, perhaps because she didn't want her furniture pieces to be viewed on their own but rather as an element of her holistic interior design.[27]

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 aspired to work in a broad range of design fields including architecture, manufacturing, interior design, textiles, graphics, advertising and presentation.[28]

The distinctive features of Knoll's furniture designs were the sleek silhouettes and geometries. This reflected her architectural training and interests. Her furniture was designed with the notion of transforming architecture into furniture, which she achieved by translating the structure and language of the modern building into a human-scaled object.

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