By giving her papers to the Smithsonian, Florence Knoll Bassett teaches us a thing or two about design.

By Paul Makovsky
July 2001

Above: Florence Knoll at an interior-design meeting for the Connecticut General Life Insurance building in the 1950s.
When I heard last year that Florence Knoll Bassett ("Shu" to her friends and colleagues) had donated her papers to the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art, I was thrilled. The historian in me was anxious to review the life and work of this legendary interior space planner and designer, who at the pinnacle of her career in 1965 gracefully withdrew from the design world after completing the interiors of the CBS headquarters, in New York.

The Knoll archive is a revelation. There are beautifully illustrated letters written to her by Eero Saarinen; photographs and sketches of her most important interior-design projects; the first house plan she did as a student at Kingswood, the girls boarding school at Cranbrook. Bassett has carefully organized all the material in color-coded files, creating special boxes to contain them. Best of all, there are short handwritten anecdotes accompanying many of the photos and sketches. On a photo of Nelson Rockefeller's desk (he was her first major client), she has circled an odd-looking inkwell. When you flip the photo over and read her explanation, you learn that the inkwell was made by her friend Isamu Noguchi. On the reverse side of a photo of the Knoll Planning Unit office, she writes that staff member Peter Andes called it "Shu U." because its young designers were being recruited by architectural firms, who had begun to start their own interior-design divisions. Bassett also produced a little illustrated book for the archive laying out her life and work--education, projects, awards, even some details of her personal life.

Above: Greeting card from Charles and Ray Eames on the occasion of Florence and Harry Hood Bassett's marriage, 1958.
Liza Kirwin, curator of manuscripts at the Archives of American Art, says that before the papers even arrived Bassett sent drawings and photos of the boxes she was fabricating to hold the archive. "Often people send us their papers, but they don't design the containers into which the papers will fit," Kirwin says. "She very methodically organized her papers and gave very special context for a lot of the documents. That's what made it an extraordinary gift."

In a rare interview, I talked to Bassett about the archive and her remarkable life--the Cranbrook years, her relationship with the Saarinens, the influence of Mies van der Rohe, her breakthroughs in space planning, her favorite projects (such as the Knoll showrooms), the threatened demolition of the Connecticut General building, and even her fight in the 1980s against billboards, an issue that has recently resurfaced.

Only Bassett--who absorbed both the warmth and humanity of Eliel Saarinen at Cranbrook and the rigorous purity of Mies--could put together such a perfect archive. Her creative process is reflected in the way she has assembled the collection: organizing, reducing, and clarifying = Mies; personal explanations and handwritten anecdotes = Cranbrook. Although Bassett never formally became a teacher like her mentors Saarinen and Mies, by managing to fit her life and work into one neat package she shows us that her papers are more than just a personal history--they are a lesson in design.

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