Florence Knoll

Her father Frederick E. Schust is a native speaker of German and her mother Mina has Canadian roots. They both disappear very early, leaving their daughter an orphan at the age of twelve.

She headed very early for art studies and started at Kingswood School, Cranbrook (1932-34). She then studied with designer Eliel Saarinen, father of Eero Saarinen at the Cranbrook Academy of Art (1934-1935), (both establishments are located on the same campus in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan). She continued her studies in urban planning (1938-1939) at the School of Architecture at Columbia University (NYC), with Professor Charles Eames among others. Then she spent a year at the Architectural Association in London where she discovered the international style of Le Corbusier. She will leave England at the start of the war.

In 1940, Florence Knoll is in Cambridge (Massachusetts) and works briefly with the American modernists Wallace K. Harrison, Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, she will be influenced by the discovery of their style and the Bauhaus movement. Eager to learn more, she enrolled at the Armor Institute (1940-41) (now Illinois Institute of Technology) and met Professor Ludwig Mies van der Rohe who would have a marked effect on her approach to design, especially in terms of clarity.

It was thus influenced by the great Masters of 20th century design.