Knoll Bassett is the first recipient of a Doctor of Humane Letters degree from the new College of Design

By Camille LeFevre

More than 40 years after retiring from a short but precedent-setting career, Florence Knoll Bassett remains an icon of mid-20th-century design. Trained as an architect in the International Style, she practiced as a furniture designer and interior space planner for 20 years, during which she changed the future and fortunes of many post-World War II designers, including Ralph Rapson. She also defined the modern aesthetic for 1950s corporate America with her clearly articulated, interdisciplinary approach to "total design," by which she seamlessly blended architecture, interior design, textiles, graphics, advertising, and presentation under her belief that, "Good design is good business."

Her pioneering work also catapulted the furniture and design firm founded by her first husband, Hans Knoll, to international acclaim -- a true testament to her influence, still strong in the 21st century. New generations of modern designers continue to "rediscover" Knoll Bassett's work. For all of these reasons, the new interdisciplinary College of Design nominated Knoll Bassett for the honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree, which the University of Minnesota bestowed earlier this year.

"Recognizing Florence Knoll Bassett with this honor signals the kind of design integration our new college is fostering," said Thomas Fisher, dean, College of Design. "Now that the University of Minnesota has formalized its design college, which integrates design disciplines from architecture and apparel to graphic design, interiors, retail merchandising, and housing studies, Knoll Bassett represents the model of the cross-disciplinary designer to which our graduates aspire. She's a living embodiment of the mid-20th-century ideal of the design disciplines interacting and working together in fluid ways and her work represents the vitality inherent to an interdisciplinary design approach now and into the future."

Cranbrook influence

Born in 1917, Knoll Bassett experienced tragedy early in her life; she was orphaned at age 12. As soon as she entered the Kingswood School at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, however, she was "adopted" by Eliel Saarinen (who was teaching at Cranbrook) and his family. After graduating from Kingswood in 1934, she stayed on at Cranbrook for two years where she continued to live and work with Saarinen and other modern designers like Carl Milles, and where she met the young Rapson. Her time at Cranbrook, she told Metropolis in July 2001, "offered a great opportunity to live and work in an atmosphere of creativity and serious work.... It also provided me with time to concentrate on design."

She spent the next two years at the Architectural Association in London where Le Corbusier's work held sway. After World War II began, she returned to the United States and apprenticed with Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, before entering the Illinois Institute of Technology (then called the Armour Institute). There, she completed her architectural education under the tutelage of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who "had a profound effect on my design approach and the clarification of design," she told Metropolis.

Knoll Bassett returned to New York City and found work in several architecture offices, where she was relegated to interiors, "being the only female," she said. She met the young German furniture designer, Hans Knoll, who needed a designer to handle interiors. In 1943, she joined his company. Integrating her innate business sense with rigorous design aesthetic she'd acquired from Saarinen and Mies, Knoll Bassett quickly began shaping the firm into one of the world's premiere design and furniture companies. By 1946, she had become Hans' business partner and wife, and the firm was renamed Knoll Associates.

"Crisp, coordinated functionalism"

One of Knoll Bassett's primary accomplishments was her creation of the Knoll Planning Unit, with which she revolutionized interior space planning and design. The PU, as it was fondly known, handled interior design for corporate clients, as well as for the Knoll company's showrooms. But PU quickly grew to encompass client relations, presentations, and marketing; a textile division featuring Knoll Bassett's colorful upholstery and fabrics; the graphic design of Knoll Associates' corporate identity; and furniture design. PU also became known as Shu U-Shu being a nickname given to her by students derived from Knoll Bassett's family name, Schust -- as Knoll Bassett's young employees were hired away by other design firms that had opened interior-design departments.

For Knoll's corporate clients, including offices for Connecticut General, Seagrams, Look Magazine, and the Heinz Company, Knoll Bassett pioneered "well-articulated interiors to complement contemporary architecture in the post World War II era," wrote Mark Coir, archives director at Cranbook, in his recommendation letter for Knoll Bassett's honorary University degree. "The look she championed -- a crisp, coordinated functionalism integrating graphics, textiles, colors, and selected contemporary furniture in designed environments -- greatly appealed to her peers and clients and continues to influence the industry today."

In the Knoll showrooms, located in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, Knoll Bassett parlayed her disciplined senses of color, proportion, and display into stunning showcases for the company's products, which represented design excellence and technological innovation through mass production. While she and her husband designed much of the furniture, Knoll Bassett also recruited a remarkable roster of designers, many of them working in the International Style.

Life-long friends and colleagues

All of these designers were, or fast became, life-long friends and colleagues. In addition to Breuer, Mies, and Saarinen, Knoll Associates also carried furniture by Harry Bertoia, Isamu Noguchi, and Ralph Rapson, her Cranbrook colleague. During the seven years Rapson designed for Knoll Associates, he recalled, "I gained the opinion of Florence as one of the sharpest, brightest, most skillful young designers I have ever known."

Rapson produced the curvaceous, aluminum Rapson Metal Line and the wood Rapson Line, represented by the bentwood Rapson Rapid Rocker, for Knoll. When Rapson opened his own furniture store in Boston in 1950, Knoll Associates was one of his suppliers and Knoll Bassett was a consultant. Soon after, Hans Knoll called Rapson with a tip that would lead to Rapson's career designing U.S. embassies throughout Scandinavia and Europe, before he came to Minneapolis in 1954 to head the University of Minnesota's architecture school.

In 1955, Hans Knoll died in a car accident while on a business trip in Cuba, leaving his wife president of Knoll Associates. In 1958, she married Harry Hood Bassett and continued at Knoll Associates, resigning in 1965 after completing the interiors of CBS headquarters in New York.

Link with Rapson underscores degree's importance

Knoll Bassett has received numerous honors and awards since then, and her work is represented in many museum collections. About receiving the honorary degree from the University of Minnesota, she wrote: "I am deeply honored.... Your gracious comments in wishing to present this prestigious award to me are certainly appreciated."

"Florence's work was so impeccable, reserved, and thoughtful," Rapson recalls. "She had very hard-nosed aesthetic considerations. We used to joke about that, because she was almost too pure. But she's become the moral standard bearer of modernist design."

Fisher adds that the link between Knoll Bassett and Rapson, for whom one of the College of Design's buildings is named, underscores the importance of the honorary degree. "Her support of and connection to Ralph Rapson makes this degree all the more meaningful, as he did so much to put this school on the map," Fisher says. "Our recognition of Knoll Bassett reinforces that tradition."