Knoll

Hans Knoll, the son of a German furniture maker, started his company in New York in 1938. Florence Schust, who had studied with the Saarinens at Cranbrook and under Mies van der Rohe in Chicago, joined in 1943 to found the Knoll Planning Unit, the interior design service she ran until 1965. She married Hans in 1946, and between them they built a catalog around architects and artists. Eero Saarinen's Womb Chair came out of that circle in the late 1940s and his Tulip chairs in 1956, Harry Bertoia turned his metalwork into wire chairs, and in 1953 Mies formally gave Knoll the production rights to the Barcelona Chair. On Quiet Menace, Knoll matters most for a purchase it made in 1968. That year it bought the Gavina Group of Bologna, which brought Marcel Breuer's designs into its catalog, including the tubular steel club chair Breuer designed at the Bauhaus in 1925 and 1926. Gavina had named it the Wassily, after Kandinsky, a painter who simply liked it, and Knoll has made it ever since. The patents ran out long ago, but Knoll owns the Wassily name, so reproductions have to sell under other ones. Herman Miller bought Knoll in 2021, and the combined company is called MillerKnoll.