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 July 2001
Florence Knoll Bassett: I got a letter from them years ago asking whether I would like to give them my papers. All those years, I didn't know what they were talking about. [Laughs.] So when other institutions began asking, I found that old letter and decided to go with them. PM: One great thing about the archives is that you put them together in a very methodical way. And the little book you did as a small part of it is fascinating. FKB: I did it because I wanted to put my career at Knoll in context. The coffee-table Knoll book jumps all over the place and doesn't really give the development of the company. PM: I never realized how important the Knoll showrooms were in terms of your design. FKB: They were important because we had to do a lot of convincing. At the time there were very few clients who were interested in these ideas. They thought they had to have traditional furniture from Grand Rapids [Michigan]. These showrooms were what really convinced them. Hans Knoll's office, for example, was a big sales tool. By doing it we showed the way to save square-footage. PM: The Chicago Knoll showroom was a dramatic space. FKB: It was incredible. That space was the negative of the New York showroom, which was full of light, windows, and color. But the one in Chicago was a miserable thing, with pipes and all that stuff going on in the high ceilings. So I painted the whole thing black, except for the floor. Then everything was delineated in light colors within the showroom to show the product. We used floods of light on all the things that we were supposed to show. Do you know how we photographed it? I didn't do it. Idaka, the photographer, did it. What he did was set up a shot, using an extremely long exposure, and then we went out to dinner for an hour or so. That was a brilliant idea of his. PM: I look at the picture of the Hans Knoll office--even though it was designed in 1952 it still looks modern. FKB: We made it logical and functional, but at the same time we tried to make it human. I did it with my husband in mind. Because he was light-skinned with golden hair, the colors were a good background for him. PM: In the archive, the pairing of the perspective sketch and the photo of the office helps explain the process you were developing. FKB: I always believed in using actual fabrics in plans, even if they were thrown together in a rough sketch like that. For some reason it worked, even though the scale was wrong. PM: What's great about the layout of the Hans Knoll office is that you reversed the traditional layout of using a desk in front of a chair. There's a table in front of a chair and a cabinet in back. FKB: Of course, that was the whole point. The traditional layout was the absolute norm when I started designing offices. They had a big box in the middle of the room. They had a table behind it, and it was always full of stuff. "That doesn't make sense," I said. "We should make the storage behind and make the front a table." That's how it got started. I was architecturally trained to think logically about space. PM: What was the reaction when you showed this to your clients? FKB: Oh, they got the idea. In those days the boss usually had a decorator. They did his office and maybe some of the other senior executives, but the people further down the line had offices designed by the purchasing agent, who ordered furniture out of a catalog. So when I came along with my questionnaire, I wanted to know what they needed. It was kind of a radical idea, but it was also logical and obvious. PM: You often think of Knoll furniture in domestic spaces. Yet when I was looking through the archive, aside from your own private work, most of the projects that the Planning Unit did were for larger spaces. FKB: If you think about it, it's only recently that architects do the buildings and the interiors. What started architects doing that was the fact that I worked on Connecticut General with Gordon Bunshaft and SOM. We were in the same office building. So it was almost like one office--the drawings went back and forth. They learned from the Planning Unit how to set up an interior-space-planning team. When I started out, there was Frank Lloyd Wright and Alvar Aalto. They were exceptions to the rule. Because I was working in architectural offices, if anything came along that involved an interior, they turned it over to me. PM: How did the Planning Unit come about in the 1940s? FKB: I was working in New York. Hans Knoll came in and was trying to sell a chair design that he had bought. That's how I met him. He had a request to do some interiors and asked me to do them for him. That's when the Planning Unit got started. So I went to work with him in a tiny little office at 601 Madison and, as we grew, we got the penthouse. At that time I started to collect all of the people I really admired, like Saarinen, Bertoia, and Rapson, who were at Cranbrook when I was there. That's how the Knoll designers happened. Except for Jens Risom, who had already worked with Hans. Risom was a very good designer and he was doing this Danish thing. Not that it wasn't good, but it was different from what was coming from the architectural world. I'd studied with Mies and was very interested in that form of design. I was responsible for convincing Mies to allow us to do his furniture. PM: Was that hard? FKB: Yes, it was. He was a silent man--very private. I told him, "I promise you we will never allow any outrageous colors or materials to be used on your furniture." I think that convinced him. But it was a new experience for him to have his furniture go into production. It had been in some kind of limited production in Europe, but it was quite limited. PM: By this time, you had other designers working for you? FKB: Oh yes. I never considered myself a furniture designer, and still don't. I designed furniture because it was needed for a specific plan. It was really people like Saarinen and Bertoia who created very sculptural pieces. Mine were architectural.
FKB: It all started from a need: we had projects of a certain scale that needed pieces like that. The chairs Eero Saarinen did were developed that way. We wanted a big comfortable chair; we needed an office chair. That's how those things got started. Eero designed a series of molded chairs and made models for three or four of them. "Which one should we start with?" he asked. "Let's start with the biggest one, just for fun," I said. We didn't know where to go. Finally we found a manufacturer over in New Jersey--a fiberglass-boat builder. We walked into this place with these great big holes in the floor, which were the mock-ups, or molds for the ships. We came with a model of the chair [laughs], and he looked at it and thought maybe we were a little crazy, but he was a nice guy. We sold him on the idea of making this chair, and then it became a very good part of his business. PM: Was it hard to find good people to work at the Planning Unit? FKB: No, it wasn't. I had a small but excellent staff. Peter Andes, who worked there, called the Planning Unit, "Shu U." As a critic I would say, "What do you think about this?" or "Why do you think it should be that way?" It was a learning experience--sometimes both ways. PM: Throughout your career you had a knack for picking the right school and the right client. How did you know to go to the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago? FKB: When the war broke out, I came back from Europe. I hadn't finished my education. I heard that Mies was out there, so I went out to see him. |
