Biography

Florence Knoll Bassett (born Schust) was an American architect and designer born in 1917 in Saginaw, Michigan. An orphan, she attended Kingswood School, a girls’ school in the Cranbrook community, co-founded by George Booth, a Detroit publisher, and Eliel Saarinen, a Finnish architect. It was thanks to Saarinen that Florence pursued her studies in architecture at the Cranbrook Academy of Art until 1939. She then went on to study in New York at Columbia University School of Architecture, then in London at the Architectural Association. In 1940, she studied at the Armour Institute (now the Illinois Institute of Technology) under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. She then worked for Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius, both architects. The following year, she moved to New York and worked for Harrison & Abramovitz, an interior design firm, where she met Hans Knoll (1914-1955), a furniture manufacturer and salesman. He appointed her director of Knoll’s Planning Unit and married her in 1946.

At Knoll, she influenced the greatest established designers and architects of the Bauhaus, as well as young talents such as Harry Bertoia. As an architect and designer, she designed tables, chairs, sofas, and storage systems. She actively promoted ergonomics in interior design and the total integration of furniture, architecture, graphic design, and textiles. In 1951, the company became Knoll International and expanded across the Atlantic. In 1955, when Hans died, Florence took over as head of the company. Three years later, she married banker Henry Hood Bassett. Florence remained chief designer at Knoll until her retirement in 1965. In 2002, she received the National Medal of Arts, and in 2004, she donated her archives to the Smithsonian Archives of American Art in Washington, D.C.