Hans Knoll

Hans Knoll was born in 1914 in Stuttgart to Walter and his wife Maia (née Vollmoeller). He learned the furniture trade as an apprentice in the family business, but as a youth also spent time in Switzerland and in Great Britain as part of his practical education. While his brother Robert was in the United States during the early 1930s, Hans worked with Jantzen Knitting Mills in Brentford, England (from 1933 to 1935) as well as for Plan Ltd. (1935 to 1938), companies with business ties to his father’s firm.[[4]]( Plan Ltd. provided Knoll with his first exposure to a company that exclusively focused on modern designer furniture. Specializing in metal-tube designs, it was headed by Serge Chermayeff, a Russian émigré who would later also move to the United States and become the second director of the Chicago Institute of Design, also known as the New Bauhaus.[[5]]( When Plan Ltd. ran into financial trouble in 1938, Hans Knoll briefly returned to Germany only to set out for the United States soon afterwards. According to the recollections of a later business partner, the relationship between Hans Knoll and his father Walter was strained. The father’s overbearing character and his enthusiastic support for the National Socialist regime had contributed to Hans’ initial move to England in 1936 and his ultimate decision to form his own business in the United States.[[6]]( It appears Knoll may have been considering the move across the Atlantic for some time, following the path of many European modernist designers who sought refuge in the United States during the late 1930s. Already in 1937, Bauhaus émigré László Moholy-Nagy, who had just moved to Chicago to set up a new design school, received a letter from his wife Sibyl, who was still in England. She told her husband of a young man, Knoll, who was dealing in patent furniture and planned to visit Moholy in the United States and was bringing “quite new and interesting ideas” with him.[[7]]( It was Florence Knoll more so than Hans who was well connected with leading design circles in the United States.[[9]]( Born on May 24, 1917 in Saginaw, Michigan to Swiss immigrant parents, she became one of the most influential interior designers of the twentieth century. She was initially trained as an architect at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, outside of Detroit, under the tutelage of Finnish-born architect Eliel Saarinen. Not unlike the German Bauhaus in some respects, Cranbrook was an artist colony and school which by the 1930s had become one of the centers of modernism in design and architecture in the United States, training the likes of Eero Saarinen, Charles and Ray Eames, Harry Bertoia, and Ralph Rapson.[[10]]( From 1938 to 1939 she was at the Architectural Association in London and in 1940 began to apprentice with Bauhaus émigrés Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius in Boston. In 1941 she finished her architectural education at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago under the supervision of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, another influential former member of the Bauhaus group. Florence Knoll’s connections to Cranbrook-trained designers as well as to the European modernists who had fled to the United States from the National Socialists would prove to be a crucial asset to the young company that Hans Knoll founded. Upon his arrival in New York City Hans Knoll initially intended to distribute his father’s company’s designs, but in 1939 he incorporated an independent firm, Hans G. Knoll Furniture Inc., with a small office at 444 Madison Avenue.[[11]]( Knoll’s goal was to bring “modern furniture” to the United States at a time when the strict and functionalist forms of the Bauhaus designers had only a limited following among Americans and were nearly entirely absent from the American furniture industry. “It was my whole idea,” he later recalled, “to develop new products working with well-known designers and to encourage their particular talents.”[[12]]( Within two decades, Knoll Associates would