Barcelona Table by Knoll

Knoll History

The Knoll Company was founded in 1938 in New York by furniture craftsman Hans Knoll, who aspired to produce modern furniture that would be elegant, functional and affordable. In 1946, he married designer Florence Schust, who had been trained as an architect, and who would ultimately be recognized as one of the most influential women in 20th century design. She played a key role in the company's development, championing the Bauhaus approach and recruiting some of its most famous luminaries, such as Mies van der Rohe, Eero Saarinen and Marcel Breur, resulting in Knoll becoming the only authorized seller of the some of the world’s most revered mid-century furniture designs.

Beginning in the 1940s, Knoll pioneered the concept of developing a working relationship with corporate clients and designing to meet their needs. In the ensuing decades, Knoll introduced tables to accommodate electronic technology, and office chairs with a fresh premise: rather than the sitter constantly adjusting the chair, the chair would adjust to the sitter! The result of this approach was a line of innovative office chairs combining ergonomic support with intuitive adaptability. Today, in addition to acclaim as a design leader, Knoll is also recognized for pioneering sustainable, “green” design policies designed to protect the biosphere.

In recognition of Knoll's contributions, the Louvre's Musée des Arts Decoratifs in Paris staged a 1972 exhibit devoted solely to the company's furniture. Knoll also currently has more than 40 pieces in the permanent Design Collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Mies van der Rohe

“Less is more.”
— Mies van der Rohe

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (March 27, 1886 – August 17, 1969) was a German-American architect who, along with Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of Modern architecture.

Mies, like many of his post World War I contemporaries, was seeking a new design process that rejected ornamentation and was guided by a problem-solving paradigm that came to be known as Form follows function. Influenced by the free-flowing spaces and the open floor plans of Frank Llyod Wright, Mies was trying to establish a 20th Century architectural style that could represent modern times just as Classical and Gothic did for their eras. At the age of 43, he was chosen to design the innovative German pavilion at the 1929 International Exhibition in Barcelona, personally designing every detail of that highly influential, open-design building, including the furniture.

“A chair is a very difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier. That is why Chippendale is famous.”
— Mies van der Rohe

Mies’ design for the iconic Barcelona chair exhibited the pure compositional lines of Modern architecture, and showed how negative space could be used to transform a functional item into sculpture. In 1930, Mies was appointed to succeed Walter Gropius as director of the Bauhaus in Dessau, and under his leadership the controversial institution continued to exert an enormous influence on all aspects of architecture and furniture design in Europe and beyond.

In America in the 1940s, Mies designed an entire new campus for the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where he continued to refine his steel-and-glass buildings. Striving for structural order balanced against the implied freedom of free-flowing open space, he called his buildings "skin and bones" architecture.

“Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.”
— Mies van der Rohe

Mies designed and built many modern high-rises in Chicago, including 860-880 Lake Shore Drive (1948-52), the first building to use an all glass and steel curtain wall in its construction, the hallmark of the modern skyscraper. In New York, he designed and built what has been regarded as the ultimate expression of the International Style of architecture, the Seagram Building, America’s first glass skyscraper.

Although not the first architect to practice simplicity in design, Mies van der Rohe carried the ideals of rationalism and minimalism to new levels, and elevated the use of industrial-age materials to an art form.