Just before NeoCon this year Florence Knoll Bassett turned 100. Her career and influence on the development of interior design as a profession is well known and documented. At a time when women architects were extremely rare, she graduated with a degree in architecture from what is now the Illinois Institute of Technology; headed at the time by Mies Van der Rohe. Before she reached the age of 25 she had grown up with, studied under or worked for Eero Saarinen, Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, and Marcel Breuer. When she was 26 she joined Hans Knollâs fledgling company and founded one of the earliest entities offering interior design services to corporations, the Knoll Planning Unit. Take heed, oh you innovative Millennial disrupters!
Dedicated to bringing modern design and modern furniture to the offices of companies building or occupying modern buildings, Mrs. Knoll could not find suitable upholstery fabrics in a market where Brocades, Chintzes and cabbage roses dominated. So her first response was to adapt simple designs from the menswear industry to commercial furniture, importing grey and beige flannels and tweeds from Scotland.
She pretty quickly found that solution lacking in several respects, so in 1947 at the age of 30 she founded Knoll Textiles and began working with mills to manufacture her own fabric designs to meet the needs of Knollâs clientele and the developing office furniture industry.
You math geeks may notice a certain symmetry here: Florence Knoll was born in 1917, she founded Knoll Textiles in 1947 and in 2017 she turned 100 and Knoll Textiles turned 70. I donât know if sheâs a math geek, but Dorothy Cosonas, the Creative Director at Knoll Textiles certainly noticed and she and her team decided to celebrate the joint anniversaries with new collections inspired by the amazing archives of the early work of the companyâs founder.
Ms. Cosonas said, âVery few textile companies can say they offer the breadth of products that have a consistent point of view for 70 years. More importantly, no one in the market is connected to a legendary design visionary like Florence Knoll. My team and I studied multiple archives and worked with various mills to reinterpret the colors, structure and materials of these textiles.â
As the plan materialized, there would be three collections rolled out during 2017 starting with the Signature Collection in April, followed by the Legacy Collection in July and the Hallmark Collection in October; all this to be kick-started with a splashy launch at NeoCon.
I was particularly impressed with the NeoCon display of the archival material arrayed down the central hallway of the showroom. As designed by Ms. Cosonas and her team, the layout and design of the display tables was in itself a work of art worthy of a place in one of our most revered museums.
It was really cool to see Florence Knollâs hand written notes along side sketches, strike-offs and samples. And there it was; beautifully arranged and displayed in a series of 6 glass display tables. Legend has it that Mrs. Knoll even invented the 3×3 sample card that has become ubiquitous in the textile business. I canât prove it, but it wouldnât surprise me. (I am 99% sure that Florence Knoll and Herbert Matter created 3âX3â sampling along with a series of other sampling tools.)
At any rate the idea of honoring Florence Knoll on her 100th birthday and the companyâs 70th anniversary by delving into archives that have been so carefully maintained was a brilliant idea. And the proof is that the collections, which are now all on the market, are not slavish re-creations but rather totally up-to-date new products with fresh designs using state of the art materials and manufacturing processes.
The Signature Collection
Comprising 3 new archive inspired patterns of upholstery fabrics, Alter Ego, Feeling Plaid and Little Devil along with a new polyurethane upholstery, Vibe II, the signature collection also includes 2 new high performance woven polyethylene wallcovering patterns, Archer II and Alloy and 10 new colors of Crossroad.
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The Legacy Collection
The Legacy Collection consists of 6 new patterns of upholstery fabrics, 2 drapery fabrics inspired by the archives along with 3 high-performance vinyl wallcoverings. The upholstery patterns are: Catwalk, Modern Tweed, Pullman, In Stitches, Stretch Appeal, and Uni-Form. The 2 drapery designs are Cyclone and Looking Glass and the Wallcoverings are Hemisphere, Rope and Lanyard.
The Hallmark Collection
Just introduced this month, the Hallmark Collection is the third and final collection of the archive inspired project. It comprises 4 new upholstery fabrics, Juno, Calypso, Overture and Cleo, a 118â wide sheer drapery, Lorelei plus 2 high-performance, multi-use woven wallcoverings (backed for wallcovering and not-backed for Panel applications), Acme and Apollo.
