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      Florence Knoll Bassett “led an office revolution”

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      As part of our mid-century modern series, we portray Florence Knoll Bassett, who transformed how we think of office design with her streamlined furniture and leadership of design brand Knoll.

      Under Knoll, Florence Knoll, as she was then called, brought modern lines and a human-centric design ethos to the American office environment. As well as leading the company’s interior design arm, the Planning Unit, she designed furniture for its collections and developed its aesthetic identity.
      She was also known for professionalising the mid-century interior design industry, combining her extensive architectural training with an eye for form and combatting the notion that interior design was the same as decorating.
      Florence Knoll (left) worked with designers and architects including Eero Saarinen. Photo courtesy of KnollIn a 1964 New York Times article about her, titled “Woman Who Led an Office Revolution Rules an Empire of Modern Design; Florence Knoll Gave Business ‘Living’ a New Look”, she said that offices had changed from being ‘decorated’ to being designed.
      “I am not a decorator,” she said in the article. “The only place I decorate is my own house.”

      Knoll was founded by Florence Knoll’s husband Hans Knoll, who was in the process of developing the company in New York City when the pair met in 1941.
      In 1943, Florence Knoll joined the burgeoning company as a designer and soon after became a full business partner upon the couple’s marriage in 1944.

      Office design pioneer Florence Knoll Bassett dies aged 101

      Today, Knoll is known for its portfolio of office furniture, including notable designs such as the Barcelona Chair by Mies van der Rohe, the Wassily Lounge Chair by Marcel Breuer, and the Womb Chair by Eero Saarinen – three pieces Florence Knoll commissioned herself through her many long-standing connections in the architecture world.
      She also created seating, tables, and storage systems for office interiors that were meant as “fill-in” pieces – uncomplicated designs that complemented the more flashy products by her peers.
      “People ask me if I am a furniture designer,” she said. “I am not. I never really sat down and designed furniture. I designed the fill-in pieces that no one else was doing. I designed sofas because no one was designing sofas.”
      Among her best-known pieces are the T Angle series of tables, which were constructed from a steel base and have laminate tops. These include a dining table, coffee tables and numerous other versions.
      Her Executive Desk, part of her Executive series and also known as the Partner’s Desk, with its rosewood top and splayed chrome-plated steel base, still looks modern today and is still produced by Knoll.
      Planning Unit specialised in corporate office interiors
      Her Lounge Collection, created in 1954, also epitomizes her approach. It encompassed a tufted lounge chair, sofa, settee, and bench that sat upon geometric, metal frames.
      Today, these pieces are treasured additions to household or corporate spaces, but Florence Knoll originally created them as a backdrop for the office interiors she designed while she led the Knoll Planning Unit.
      Founded by Florence Knoll in 1946, the Planning Unit consisted of a small group of Knoll designers that created corporate office interiors for prominent companies such as the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company, Cowles Publications and CBS.
      Led by Florence Knoll’s exacting eye, the small team was tasked with designing furniture, textiles and objects for a space.
      Florence Knoll designed the interiors for the CBS building in New YorkIn the 1960s, Florence Knoll designed the interiors of a new CBS headquarters in New York City, housed in a black-clad skyscraper by friend Eero Saarinen.
      “Her job embraces everything from the choice of wall coverings – sometimes felt or tweed for the sake of acoustics – to ashtrays, pictures and door handles,” the New York Times said of her involvement in the project.
      “She has led people to see that texture in fabrics can be as interesting as a print (she dislikes prints) and that steel legs on tables, chairs and sofas can have grace and elegance.”
      Bespoke pieces usually custom-made for interior projects
      The bespoke furniture that Florence Knoll designed for projects such as the CBS headquarters would then be folded into the Knoll catalogue.
      “The spaces suggest the furniture, and sometimes that furniture was not in our catalog,” Vincent Cafiero, an early member of the Planning Unit, said.
      During this period, Florence Knoll also started a textile program at the company, which would become Knoll Textiles. This saw her develop a “tagged sample and display system”, a technique used industry-wide today.
      As Knoll grew, Florence Knoll would also shape much of the company’s identity and practices.
      She worked with designer Herbert Matter to create branding for Knoll, including its advertisements, stationary and logo, imbuing its branding with the same straightforward style as her personal work.
      Florence Knoll also filled the company’s catalogue with commissions from her many connections, gathered during her architectural training at schools including he Cranbrook Academy of Art, Columbia University, Architectural Association and Illinois Institute of Technology.
      Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona chair is among the pieces commissioned by Florence Knoll. Photo by Adrià GoulaBorn and raised in Michigan, her training began in earnest at age 12, when Florence was orphaned after the death of her father at age 5 and mother at 12.
      Her guardian encouraged her to choose a boarding school, where the young Florence chose the Kingswood School for Girls, a school on the same grounds as Cranbrook Academy of Art.
      Eilel Saarinen, Cranbrook’s then headmaster and designer of both schools, noticed Florence’s interest in architecture and eventually “virtually adopted” Florence into the Saarinen family, according to Knoll.
      Mies van der Rohe was “teacher and friend”
      She would go on to befriend his son, Eero, and other prominent designers during her studies and beyond including Charles Eames, Harry Bertoia, Isamu Noguchi and George Nakashima.
      Florence was also mentored by architects Alvar Aalto, Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer.
      Designer Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who she studied under at the Illinois Institute of Technology, had perhaps the most lasting influence on her style, as seen in her methodical, detail-oriented approach.
      “Like her teacher and friend Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Ms Knoll Bassett’s attention to detail was all-encompassing, relentless, and, over time, the stuff of legend,” said Knoll.

      The organic designs of Eero Saarinen went “beyond the measly ABC” of modernism

      Her colleagues held her “unerring” taste in high regard.
      “Each time I go East I see something you have done,” wrote Charles Eames in a 1957 letter to Florence Knoll. “It is always good, and I feel grateful to you for doing such work in a world where mediocrity is the norm.”
      Upon Hans Knoll’s sudden death in 1955, Florence Knoll took over leadership of the company as president until 1960, when she switched back into a design and development role and moved to Florida with her second husband Henry Hood Bassett.
      She officially retired from the company in 1965 at age 48.
      Under her five years as president Knoll doubled in size, cementing its status as a leader in the design industry.
      “[Florence Knoll] probably did more than any other single figure to create the modern, sleek, postwar American office, introducing contemporary furniture and a sense of open planning into the work environment,” wrote The Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger in 1984.
      In 1961, Florence Knoll became the first woman to receive the Gold Medal for Industrial Design from the American Institute of Architects, and in 2003 she was presented with the National Medal of Arts.
      “We have lost one of the great design forces of the 20th century,” Goldberger said when Florence Knoll died in 2019. “Florence Knoll Bassett may have done more than anyone else to create what we think of as the ‘Mad Men’ design of the midcentury modern workspace.”
      Illustration by Jack BedfordMid-century modern
      This article is part of Dezeen’s mid-century modern design series, which looks at the enduring presence of mid-century modern design, profiles its most iconic architects and designers, and explores how the style is developing in the 21st century.
      This series was created in partnership with Made – a UK furniture retailer that aims to bring aspirational design at affordable prices, with a goal to make every home as original as the people inside it. Elevate the everyday with collections that are made to last, available to shop now at made.com.

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      “I love mid-century modern but it makes me sad”

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      Mid-century modern design may meet our needs even more now than when it first appeared, but that doesn’t mean we should idolise the style, writes John Jervis.

      I love mid-century modern, but it makes me sad. In its beauty and simplicity, it speaks of postwar optimism, and a belief in a better world – one of prosperity and peace, with large homes and larger pay packets. It’s not the fault of a bunch of attractive designs that this proved to be a mirage, even a fraud. But mid-century modern was wrapped up in that delusion, even contributed to it. And the design industry enjoyed, and continues to enjoy, the ride just a little too much.
      In the 1950s, mid-century modern design promised a lifestyle free from markers of wealth and privilege, free of decorative excess, of clutter and dirt, free from the past. In reality, there were few progressive ideals involved. Before the war, modernist designers had struggled to bring their ideas to mass production, but still sought to raise living standards in cities, designing ‘minimum dwellings’ with floorplans, kitchens and furnishings calculated to maximize space and improve lives.
      Their postwar successors – all those heroic, big-name designers we celebrate as prophets of a modern, democratic future – turned out to be less public-spirited. When mass production of modernist designs became a reality, they chose lucrative careers working, almost exclusively, for high-end manufacturers.
      Then, as now, class was deeply embedded in design’s power
      And those manufacturers rarely considered, pursued or achieved affordability or accessibility, and still don’t. There may well be perfectly justifiable arguments – and realities – around balancing profitability, quality and investment, and achieving sustainability. Yet it is fair to say that most such companies have never sought a mass consumer market – the sort of market that would erode the cachet and returns of their intellectual property. Then, as now, class was deeply embedded in design’s power, even as its pioneers proclaimed the advent of a classless era.

      To be fair, that worked both ways. The golden age of mid-century modern design barely stretches a couple of decades, partly because it was never that popular. Even when incomes grew, and aspirational furnishings became just about affordable, most consumers turned not to sanctioned ‘good design’, but to products with other, perhaps more important, meanings – nostalgia, craft, ornament, community, warmth.
      To the despair of critics, heavy ‘baroque’ furniture remained the preferred choice of consumers during the German economic miracle, while Americans showed a similar predilection for colonial styles. In the heyday of the Italian furniture industry, many manufacturers stuck to an aesthetic decried by Domus editor Ernesto Rogers as ‘Cantu Chippendale’.

      “There was a profound belief in the power of the polymath during the mid-century period”

      Just as tellingly, when the wider population of mid-century modern poster child Finland was finally able to afford the country’s furniture, the new ‘Tower’ suite was the immediate bestseller. Released in 1971, this three-piece sofa-armchair combo – a typology anathema in design circles – adopted a traditional ‘English style’, with comfortable upholstery and oak veneer over foam and chipboard. It turned out that imported British TV shows were more influential than lecturing from design’s great and good about a modernist canon.
      In the postwar era, that great and good – a pale, male and privileged elite – secured its status rapidly, with a raft of government- and industry-backed organizations such as Britain’s Council of Industrial Design and the Industrial Designers Society of America, all dedicated to imposing universal standards of ‘good design’.
      Soon, even receptive audiences – including many young designers – began to find both the discourse and the results tedious, turning to Victoriana, pop and eventually postmodernism as the 1960s progressed. Some rejected ‘design’ in its entirety, looking to alternative culture instead, epitomised by the success of the Whole Earth Catalog.
      Why has mid-century modern now become the default style for contemporary interiors?
      The reasons behind changes in taste are always hard to pinpoint, but in this instance, it seems many were looking for a richness, diversity, vibrancy and meaning in their lives that mid-century modern was failing to provide – an opportunity to express their personality and creativity through their home decor. So why has mid-century modern now become the default style for contemporary interiors? As with Victorian design’s comeback in the 1960s, or art deco in the 1980s and brutalism in the 2000s, such revivals are far from unusual, but it’s still curious that mid-century modern meets our needs more than during its heyday.
      Some of that may be practical. As more and more of us are crammed into ever smaller homes, squeezing a spindly faux-mid-century modern desk into a bedroom is more realistic than some glorious art deco behemoth. And, as we constantly move from space to space, its lightness and modularity make perfect sense. Other reasons are less tangible, less knowable – perhaps mid-century modern offers a clarity, calm and sense of control that is hard to find in the rest of our lives.

      Mid-century modern design “embraced a more human aesthetic while remaining aggressively forward-looking”

      The financial equation hasn’t changed over the decades, though. Manufacturers still have a tight grip on their ‘originals’, leaving the vast majority of us buying knock-offs, or flat-packed imitations, as we attempt to Marie Kondo our existence.
      But how long will everyone want to live in these ranks of pristine waiting rooms? My aspirations for a mid-century modern bachelor pad – a Julius Shulman photo on the cheap – have long since fallen away. Leaving behind that quest for a lifestyle that never existed in the first place has improved my lot considerably. It is the (slightly mannered) accumulation of battered paperbacks in the Penguin donkey and the coffee stain on the Aalto stool that give them their charm. And their submersion in the general detritus of life gives them context and meaning.
      Maybe we just don’t need another generation of Eames loungers
      And there is another thing that might speed up a mid-century modern rethink. In promotional literature, its timelessness and durability have long been trumpeted as the route to a sustainable future. Perhaps this claim is no longer quite so convincing. Regenerative and circular design requires us to instead embrace age, imperfection, decay, decomposition, even odour – to view products as a passing moment in the life of a material, with longevity as a potential drawback. So maybe we just don’t need another generation of Eames loungers.
      In this context, mid-century modern’s ‘timeless perfection’ can seem a cold quality, one throwing a harsh light on our own imperfections and frailties – our human nature – while overlooking our concern with and capacity for joy. The obsessive repetition of this mantra, and of outdated concepts of ‘good design’, invites the backlash that brought mid-century modern design to a shuddering halt last time round, viewed as sterile, inflexible, lifeless.
      Certainly, like so many others, I will always find mid-century modern beautiful, even sublime, and I’ve got my eyes on a few more alluring examples. But I wouldn’t want too much of it in my life.
      Main photography by Joe Fletcher.
      John Jervis is a writer, editor, project manager and ghost writer across a range of media, including Icon, Frame, RIBA Journal, Apollo, ArtAsiaPacific, Thames & Hudson, ACC, WePresent, Laurence King and others. He has just published his first book, 50 Design Ideas You Really Need to Know, with Greenfinch Books.
      Illustration by Jack BedfordMid-century modern
      This article is part of Dezeen’s mid-century modern design series, which looks at the enduring presence of mid-century modern design, profiles its most iconic architects and designers, and explores how the style is developing in the 21st century.
      This series was created in partnership with Made – a UK furniture retailer that aims to bring aspirational design at affordable prices, with a goal to make every home as original as the people inside it. Elevate the everyday with collections that are made to last, available to shop now at made.com.

      Read more: More