Florence Knoll

Designer, born in Saginaw, Michigan, USA. After architecture and design study and work with Eliel Saarinen, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and Mies van der Rohe, she joined the Hans G Knoll furniture company (1943), where she perfected such office features as the executive table desk and the boat-shaped conference table. Fabric walls and natural materials in her institutional and commercial interiors humanized the International style. Marrying Knoll in 1946, she headed the company after his death (1955–9). In 1965 she started a private practice.

Florence Knoll Bassett (born May 24, 1917) is an American architect and furniture designer who studied under the likes of Mies van der Rohe and Eero Saarinen. In 1943 she join with her husband Hans Knoll in redirecting Hans's furniture company more toward a modernist, Scandinavian style.

Her American interpretation of minimalist, rationalist design theories is clearly evident in Knoll's storage pieces.

As an architect, Knoll's most famous creations are the Connecticut General Life Insurance building in Bloomfield, Connecticut and the interior of the CBS Building in New York City.

In the 1950's Florence Knoll's work was often displayed at the Museum of Modern Art's "Good Design" exhibits. Although Knoll did a great deal of residential work, the International Style she worked in was specially in successful corporate offices.

Knoll's vision for the new office was clean and uncluttered, and the corporate boom of the 1960's provided the perfect opportunity for her to change the way people looked at work in their offices.