Florence Knoll changed the world's conception of how to decorate an office space with her innovative, art-centered and Bauhaus-inspired notions about functional design.

Florence Schust Meets Hans Knoll

Originally from Michigan, Florence Schust began working as a part-time interior space planner for furniture designer and salesman Hans Knoll in 1943, when he offered her a project designing an office for Secretary of War Henry Stimson.

Both Florence (“Shu” as she was known to her friends and colleagues) and Hans had been immersed in the Bauhaus aesthetic and philosophy at an early age. As the only woman in Knoll's offices, she was the go-to person for interior design jobs.

The two soon found they had many ideas in common. Both were infatuated with Bauhaus, certainly, which meant creating things that "represented design excellence, technological innovation and mass production," as the company put it.

Still, Florence wasn’t crazy about the furniture Hans was offering. She wanted to push it much further in a sculptural direction, and she also had some emerging ideas about the way space should be planned.

Florence Changes the Way the Design Industry Interacts

She set up the Knoll Planning Unit, which developed from her growing realization that, while clients might know very well what they needed, they were rarely able to communicate those needs.

She became one of the first in the interior design industry to have lengthy meetings with everyone involved in a project to try to tease out, not what each person thought would make his job more efficient, but which elements actually would make the job more efficient.

Three years later, the design duo married and founded what eventually became Knoll International. Florence gradually took complete control of every aspect of the design, from the graphics of the company letterhead and business cards to the smallest details of a new client’s offices.

Today's interior and furniture designers owe a debt to Florence, who was the first to credit her designers by name and pay them royalties, a degree of respect that owed something to her many personal friendships with designers – she knew Eero Saarinen and Harry Bertoia, for example, from her days at Cranbrook Academy of Art – but also to her idea that interiors should be designed rather than decorated.

Florence's Own Aesthetic Convinces Clients

For herself, too, Florence saw Knoll as the perfect experimental design lab. She came up with unique ways to design the various Knoll offices so that they would be selling points for new clients.

For one of Hans’ offices, a 12 x 12-foot space, she painted the walls white except for the one behind Hans’ desk, which was matte black, and she used teak furniture and Indian silk curtains to “set off his blond hair and ruddy complexion.”

Once clients realized the actual dimensions of the space versus how large it seemed, they were sold.

Florence herself was a credentialed architect, although she described the pieces that she designed (with a modesty that seems ludicrous given the fact that her pieces are now displayed in MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum, the Louvre and the Smithsonian) as “fill-ins” – cabinetry and such that was needed after the initial designs had been completed.

Florence Knoll's Projects and Influence

Florence went on to design projects for the Connecticut General Life Insurance building, the CBS building, the Seagram's and Look magazine offices and the Heinz Company headquarters, staying on at the company for ten years after Hans’ death in 1955.

Knoll made a name for herself in the 1980s in Miami, where she eventually settled, by campaigning—with ultimate futility, as it happened—against billboards.

Of her influence and often maddening precision, longtime Knoll quality control manager Bo Lonwell has said, “She had that ability to critique a design, to tear it apart and put it back together. She did it with Charles Pollock’s chair. Pollock’s chair would never have been the success it is today had not Shu taken Charles under her wing and critiqued the hell out of it, and made the proportions right, and done everything right. But you know, after all was said and done, and she finally agreed on it, it was absolutely perfect.”

Highlights of Florence Knoll's Interior Design Career

• Knoll won four of the Museum of Modern Art's “Good Design” competitions, and Knoll designs are still displayed today among others on MoMA’s top floor.
• The University of Miami presented Florence Knoll with an honorary doctorate in architecture in 1995.
• Florence became the first woman to receive the American Institute of Architects' Gold Medal for Industrial Design in 1961.
• Knoll was awarded the 2002 National Medal of Arts for her singular contribution to American design.

Additional Information:

• The Story of Knoll International
• Bauhaus Furniture Design at Knoll