This is Knoll

Connection to Architecture

The Bauhaus—founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius—sought to unite the creative efforts of art, design, and industry until they became “inseparable components of a new architecture.” In the 1930s, Gropius and Bauhaus designers Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe arrived in the United States.

They arrived just as Florence Knoll (then Schust) was completing her studies at Cranbrook Academy of Art, where she befriended Eliel Saarinen and his son Eero, Harry Bertoia, Ralph Rapson, Charles Eames, and Ray Kaiser (later, Ray Eames). She then studied architecture with Mies at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) and interned in the office of Gropius and Breuer. All three became valuable mentors and instilled in her a lifelong belief in the principle of Total Design—design not as the creation of single objects, but rather as a “total architecture.”