Knoll International

Products from this producer offered by Prague Art & Design

Hans Knoll was born in Stuttgart in Germany in 1914. His father, Walter C. Knoll, was among the first entrepreneurs active in furniture manufacturing in Weimar to begin producing modern furniture designed by the Bauhaus students – Marcel Breuer, Miese van der Rohe and others. Shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, Hans Knoll emigrated to the United States. There he met Florence Schust who designed interiors for him while working for Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer in their architectonic studio in Boston. After the war, in 1946, Knoll and Schust established their own company Knoll Associates Inc. and married in the same year. Their first shop opened at the Madison Avenue in New York and was, equally as the first official collection of the Knoll furniture, designed by Jens Risom. Hans Knoll was perfectly aware that modern architects needed modern furniture, which resulted in the successful collaboration among designers and architects, including Frank Gehry, Eero Saarinen, Isamu Noguchi, Roberto Venturi and Miese van der Rohe. The significance of the Knoll company is today also proved by the fact that more than 40 its products are part of the permanent exhibition of the design collection in the New York Museum of Modern Art (MOMA).

.