Cesca Chair 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.

Marcel Breuer

One of the most influential architects and furniture designers of the 20th century, Marcel Lajos Breuer (1902-1981) briefly studied painting and sculpture at Vienna Academy of Fine Arts before becoming an apprentice in the Bauhaus furniture workshop, where he met three older giants of the era — Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Walter Gropius — who were to have life-long influence upon his professional life.

Invited in 1925 by Walter Gropius to head up the new Bauhaus furniture workshop, Breuer began to develop his innovative tubular Steel Club chair, later christened the Wassily Chair. Named for Breuer’s Bauhaus roommate Wassily Kandinsky, the Wassily chair was inspired by the tubular frame of a bicycle and was immediately hailed as an important breakthrough in furniture design. Breuer followed his success with another landmark modern furniture design in 1928, the Cesca chair, named for his daughter. Revolutionary in its simplicity, the Cesca combined natural cane and wood with the industrial-age aesthetic of cantilevered tubular steel in a minimalist design. Breuer would go on to design a whole range of tubular metal furniture before turning his attention to architecture.

In 1937, Breuer joined Walter Gropius as an architecture teacher at the Harvard School of Design, where some of his soon-to-be famous students would include Philip Johnson and I.M. Pei. Between 1940 and 1950, Breuer designed seventy private houses. For his large public buildings, Breuer had begun to experiment with monumental concrete forms which he called “concrete sculpture,” culminating in the mid-1960s in his imposing structure for the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, still his chief legacy.

With his Bauhaus colleagues, Breuer’s designs continue to influence the look of cities and interiors around the world.