Knoll at Fulton Marketplace, Chicago: The Times They Are A-Changing

At NeoCon a lot of the hallway chatter concerned the fact of Knoll’s having opened its new showroom in the already up and very fast coming neighborhood of the Fulton Marketplace, along with Herman Miller’s announced plan to relocate to a space of its own, somewhere outside theMart. The chatter I heard seemed to fall into more or less two big questions: “What does this mean for NeoCon?” and “What does this say about our industry?” The real answers will unfold in the future, but I have ideas to share about it what it means and where it will lead. But before wading into what might happen in the future, I think it’s prudent to take a quick look at the past track record of the industry and of Knoll in particular. There are many ways to define the industry, but for relative consistency I look at the size of …