KNOLL PLANNING UNIT
Ladislav Sutnar [Designer], Knoll Associates
Ladislav Sutnar [Designer], Knoll Associates: KNOLL PLANNING UNIT. New York: Knoll Associates, n. d. [c. 1954]. Original edition. Slim quarto. Single fold four-page brochure printed in two colors. List of 15 services and partial client list. Uncredited design by Ladislav Sutnar. Uncoated sheet lightly handled, but a nearly fine copy.
8.5 x 11 four-page brochure with lovely typography by Ladislav Sutnar, but the choice of yellow for the second color was not repeated. A nice piece of original ephemera with an extraordinary pedigree.
The partial list of Knoll Planning Unit clients included Harrison and Abramovitz; Wurster, Bernardi and Emmons; Pereira and Luckman; Skidmore, Owings and Merrill; McKie and Kamrath; Smith, Hinchman and Grylls; Eero Saarinen and Associates; Alden B. Dow; Douglas Orr; Kenneth Franzheim; Bolton and Barnstone; and Eggers and Higgins; as well as American Embassies in Havana, Stockholm, and Copenhagen.
Ladislav Sutnar (1897 – 1976) arrived in the United States on April 14th, 1939 as the exhibition designer in charge of the Czechoslovakian pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. Sutnar was the Director of the State School of Graphic Arts in Prague and enjoyed a reputation as one of the leading Czech proponents of Functionalist graphic and industrial design.
Unfortunately for Sutnar’s American assignment, Czechoslovakia had ceased to exist the previous month. Germany invaded Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939, and divided the country into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the puppet Slovak State. The dissolution of Czechoslovakia and the outbreak of World War II stranded Sutnar in New York City where he remained and worked for the rest of his life.
By 1939 many former Bauhaus faculty members—Marcel Breuer, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, László Moholy-Nagy, Joseph Albers, and others—had won teaching positions at various American Universities. These educators were instrumental in bringing European modernism to American architecture and design. America offered the Europeans not only a safe haven, but also great opportunities to make their modernist visions reality. The dynamically developing US building industry and the open mass-production market permitted the exiled Avant-Garde to continue pursuing their ideas in a democratically minded society.
It was in this exile community that Paul Rand introduced Sutnar to Knud Lönberg-Holm, the director of Information Research for Sweet’s Catalog Service, the mediator for trade, construction and hardware catalogs that were collected in huge binders and distributed to businesses and architects throughout the United States.
In 1941 Lönberg-Holm appointed Sutnar as chief designer of the Information Research Division. Together the two men used modern functional principles to solve the contemporary problem of information organization and —most importantly—retrieval. During the next 20 years at Sweet’s Sutnar and Lönberg-Holm defined and pioneered the field now called information design.
For those of you wondering what the fuss is all about, here's a brief history of Knoll: Hans Knoll founded his eponymous company in New York in 1938, just one year after immigrating from Germany. He must already have had big dreams, for he posted a sign saying "Factory No. 1" outside the single second-story room he rented on East 72nd Street. Hans's father was the pioneering German manufacturer of modern furniture, Walter. Establishing the H.G. Knoll Furniture Company was Hans's declaration of independence.
Hans Knoll, born and raised in Stuttgart, had been educated in England and Switzerland during an era of aesthetic and social revolution. An admirer of the Bauhaus, he was familiar with its giants of design and architecture, including Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Stuttgart, one of the breeding grounds for the crop of new ideas generated in during the 1920s, hosted many exhibitions of the Deutscher Werkbund, a government organization that promoted German design and architecture. Such were the influences on young Hans Knoll. By the time he crossed the Atlantic at age 24, he had formulated the credo that would distinguish his company: Modern architects need modern furniture for their modern buildings.
Many of those modern architects had left Germany before Knoll. In 1933, the Nazis had shut down the Bauhaus, a hothouse of ideas that nurtured some of the 20th century's greatest architects, designers, and artists. Mies Van der Rohe, Breuer, and Gropius, among others, fled to the United States, transplanting the philosophies of architecture that have evolved into American design culture as we know it. In 1932, the year before the Nazis sparked the exodus of many of Germany's great young designers, George W. Booth established the Academy of Art at Cranbrook, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. He selected Eliel Saarinen, a Finnish èmigrè and noted modern architect, as president. Cranbrook, as the academy came to be known, had much in common with the Bauhaus. Both were schools and residential communities for practicing artists, founded on the utopian ideal that aesthetic values would tame the chaos of industrial society. Each was committed to an underlying competence in craft and craftsmanship. Cranbrook's faculty and graduates, like those of the Bauhaus, had a major impact on 20th century art, design and architecture, and many later became associated with the Knoll company.
America's isolation from the modern movement began to dissipate in 1940 when two young American instructors from Cranbrook - Eero Saarinen, Eliel's son, and Charles Eames-won an international competition for furniture design conducted by New York's Museum of Modern Art. Since it was unprecedented for Americans to achieve honors in the field of furniture design, Eames and Saarinen and their furniture prototypes began to change the perception that only Europe produced superior designers. When the postwar building boom erupted in an explosion of homes and office buildings, it was the architects of the Bauhaus who were selected to design corporate America. In the second half of the 20th century the faculty and graduates of both the Bauhaus and Cranbrook helped set the standard for contemporary architecture and design around the world.
During the early 1940s, Knoll had begun to think about developing a base for manufacturing outside New York City. An excellent business manager, he began investigating eastern Pennsylvania because of its concentrated population of German-Americans and Pennsylvania Dutch. The community had a tradition of meticulous craftsmanship and a potential supply of healthy young laborers returning from the war who no longer wanted to farm. Knoll made his first major investment: a former planing mill in Pennsburg, near Quakertown.
During the war, Knoll had met and hired Florence Schust, a young space planner and designer who later helped Knoll achieve his vision of modern furniture and interiors for modern buildings. As a student at Cranbrook, Schust, had became friends with the Saarinen family and spent summers with them at their home in Hvitrask, Finland. She also toured Europe, visiting the great architectural sites. She later studied at the Architectural Association in London at the suggestion of the great Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, and spent two years there under the influence of Le Corbusier.
At the outbreak of the war, Schust returned to the U.S., apprenticing with Gropius and Breuer until she entered the Armour Institute (subsequently the Illinois Institute of Technology) to complete her degree. There, Mies van der Rohe, the head of the school of architecture, had a profound effect on her design approach. Schust moved to New York after graduation and worked in several architectural offices where, as the only female, she was assigned the few interiors projects that came along.
When Schust joined Knoll's company, she considered herself an interior designer with "opinions" about furniture-not, strictly speaking, a furniture designer. The two had a difficult time finding work involving contemporary design; when they did, production proved problematic because materials were limited by wartime shortages. Nevertheless, they persisted.
Knoll and Schust married in 1946. They also formalized their business partnership, which became Knoll Associates Inc. Florence's keen eye for design, Hans's knowledge of furniture manufacturing and marketing, and their limitless energy proved to be a winning combination. Florence played a critical role in the company's development. She championed the Bauhaus approach to furniture design: to offer objects that reflected design excellence, technological innovation and mass production. Together, the Knolls searched out and nurtured talented designers. They believed strongly that designers should be credited by name and paid royalties for their designs. Knoll continues that tradition today.
After the death of Hans Knoll in 1955, Florence Knoll took over as president and continued to exert her influence on all aspects of design, while leaving business matters to others. In 1958, she married Harry Hood Bassett, and began dividing her time between New York and Florida. In 1965, she resigned from the company, withdrawing from the industry completely but leaving the company in the hands of those she had trained and inspired.