The Kansas State University College of Architecture, Planning and Design is pleased to announce an exhibit of classic and contemporary furniture.

Knoll

will be exhibited in the Chang Gallery of Seaton Hall through Friday, February 8, 2008. The Gallery is open to the public without charge from 8:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m. on weekdays.

Pieces designed by Florence Knoll Basset, Harry Bertoia, Isamu Noguchi, Jens Risom, Frank Gehry and Eero Saarinen are included in the exhibit.

The origins of Knoll Associates, celebrated USA furniture manufacturer and distributor lay, in the New York showroom of the Hans G. Knoll Furniture Company established in 1938 by German-born Hans Knoll. Producing furniture by many leading 20th-century designers, it became closely identified with Modernism and the image of corporate interiors in post-Second World War America. In the second half of the 20th century, the company produced many ‘classic’ designs from the 1920s and 1930s by Mies Van Der Rohe, Marcel Breuer and others.

Born in Stuttgart, Knoll (1914-53) was the son of a furniture maker. After a period in Britain in the second half of the 1930s working with Tom Parker as the Parker-Knoll furniture design partnership, he emigrated to the United States in 1937, establishing a new company with a factory in Pennsylvania. He worked closely with the Scandinavian designer Jens Risom, who produced chairs, tables, and other items for Knoll in 1941. Two years later, Cranbrook trained architect-designer Florence Knoll joined the company and took on responsibility for the Planning Unit, marrying Hans Knoll in 1946. Together, in the same year, they founded Knoll Associates, opening a showroom in Madison Avenue in New York. The company became H.G. Knoll International in 1951, then Knoll International in 1955, two years after Hans’s death in a car crash in 1953.

The Knolls marketed ‘classic’ designs by leading European Modernists, including Mies Van Der Rohe (under licence) and Marcel Breuer, as well as those of Cranbrook graduates such as Eero Saarinen and Harry Bertoia. Such designs were well suited to the progressive ethos of Modernist corporate interiors and furnishings in the post-Second World War period. Florence Knoll ran the company from 1953 to 1965, during which time it expanded considerably. Swiss-born Herbert Matter had been commissioned by Hans Knoll in 1946 to design the company’s graphic material, endowing it with a strong Modernist ethos as well as the company’s trademark. Taking over from Matter in the the mid-1960s, Massimo Vignelli was charged with the corporate graphic and publicity design, continuing the company’s commitment to high standards of design throughout its operations. Over the following decades furniture designs were commissioned from many leading international designers, including Tobia Scarpa, Gae Aulenti, Richard Meier, Ettore Sottsass, Ross Lovegrove and Frank Gehry.

The exhibit is made possible by Knoll, Inc., New York, NY, with assistance by Knoll, Inc. of Kansas City, MO.

For more information, contact:
Steve Davidson, 785.532.5992
Diane Potts, 785.532.1090