The Pa. furniture company that brought ‘mid-century modern’ to America

In 1938, Hans Knoll, son of a German furniture maker, moved to New York City and found a one-room space on East 72nd Street. He wanted to start a furniture company that would largely import European-designed furniture for the American buyer.

Optimistically, he hung a sign reading “Factory Nr. 1” on the door.

The beginning of World War II would make importing European furniture extremely difficult, forcing Knoll to devise a quick pivot.

It was a move that would birth the mid-century modern aesthetic and change the way American families looked at furniture and their homes. It was also a move that would make East Greenville, Pa., one of the focal points of the burgeoning aesthetic defined by clean lines, unadorned forms, and functionality.

“That pivot is foundational to the Knoll story,” Amy Auscherman, MillerKnoll’s director of archives and brand heritage, said in an email.

Knoll, she said, “quickly adapted,” seeking out American designers and domestic production. More than a hundred miles from East 72nd Street, he took over a former dance hall in East Greenville in 1941 and started the first manufacturing facility for his furniture company, then called Hans Knoll Furniture Company.

“He was drawn by the area’s skilled Pennsylvania Dutch craftspeople, whose language and woodworking traditions reminded him of his German roots,” Auscherman said.

Two years later, in 1943, Florence Schust — an architect mentored by the legendary Eliel Saarinen, and a peer of his son Eero and the American designer Charles Eames — joined Knoll’s company, pioneering its interior design division.

Schust married Knoll in 1946, and the two ran the furniture business together, calling it Knoll Associates.

“Hans brought an entrepreneurial drive,” said Auscherman, “while Florence applied the discipline of her Bauhaus education and a belief in ‘total design,’ an approach that integrated furniture, textiles, architecture, and interiors into a cohesive whole.”

Doing that, against the backdrop of the war, meant dealing with the supply shortage and limited resources. Florence Knoll tapped into her community of artist peers.

Drawing from his collaboration with Eames on MoMA’s “1941 Organic Design in Home Furnishings” competition, where the duo experimented with bending plywood, Eero Saarinen made the “Grasshopper” Chair for Knoll in 1946. Its curved frame, which reminded Saarinen of the insect’s hind legs, remains in production today.

With its curved back and deep seat, the chair was meant for lounging and rest, and exhibits an early use of bent laminated wood, a light but strong material used in wartime aviation that would be very popular in postwar furniture manufacture in the face of scarcity.

“The 1940s were a formative decade for Knoll,” said Auscherman. “What’s especially compelling about this period is how Hans and Florence Knoll — through their combined vision — responded creatively to the constraints and possibilities of the moment.”

“He’s working with what he can have access to — scraps of wood. But he’s making them look amazing by using his ingenuity, using the design training he had in Europe. He can’t use fabric so sometimes he’s recycling parachute straps. Ingenuity is really the theme that runs throughout Knoll … and gives birth to a whole new design sense, postwar,” said Elisabeth Agro, the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Nancy M. McNeil curator of American modern and contemporary crafts and decorative arts, who included the Model 61 “Grasshopper Chair” in the museum’s ongoing “Boom: Art and Design in the 1940s” show.

As a decade, the 1940s were marked by paucity which led to artistic innovation — not just in furniture, but in clothes, art, photography, and in the way American society thought of design as a social construct. With the move away from the old-school “aristocratic,” European aesthetic, stylish, modern, and less fussy frames and forms were gaining popularity. Moving away from traditional materials helped the mass production of such designs, making them affordable for the booming postwar American middle class.

“I think in the literature of the period, there is a tendency to start at 1945 when looking at the postwar period. But thinking about the first half of the decade allows us to really dispel the misconception that creative production stopped in the first part of the decade because of WWII,” said Jessica Smith, the PMA’s chief curator. “It took different avenues and pivoted in different ways, but there were still people who were using their creative beings to do new and innovative things.”

“That convergence of ambition, wartime reality, and regional craft laid the foundation for the Knoll we know today,” said Auscherman.

What Knoll lost in terms of importing European material, he gained in hiring talented immigrant artists from European countries who were making their way into the U.S., armed with new and exciting design aesthetics. The Swiss graphic designer Herbert Matter was instrumental in creating Knoll’s logo and catalogs.

“Wartime scarcity pushed the company to experiment with new materials and modular systems — elements that became signatures of the Knoll look. The result was a visual design language that felt both modern and pragmatic: refined lines, honest materials, and a sense of purpose,” said Auscherman.

The uptick in construction of homes in post-WWII America meant more people looking to buy furniture. Ornate wardrobes and Victorian couches were making way for more modular furniture that would fit in the smaller homes — just the kind Knoll was commissioning from artists.

Florence Knoll’s “total design” aesthetic had Knoll manufacturing home decor. Taken in by a lamp Isamu Noguchi designed as a gift for his sister, she and Hans Knoll approached the designer. Wanting to scale it for production, they asked the artist to simplify the design. The result was a lamp with a three-legged wood base and a cylindrical PVC shade.

The “Model 9 Lamp,” also on view at PMA, was born.

The Grasshopper chair and this lamp, Auscherman said, “mark a beginning of Knoll’s investment in working with artists and architects to create furniture that is functional, formally ambitious, and culturally resonant.” A 2019 New York Times obituary of Florence Knoll notes she acquired rights to these creations, paid the artists commissions and royalties, and gave them credit.

The later fruits of such collaborations include Saarinen’s iconic “Womb Chair” (1948). Florence Knoll wanted “a chair that is like a basket full of pillows … something [she] could really curl up in”) and the "Tulip Chair" (1957), a part of Knoll’s Pedestal Collection with which the designer wanted to “clear up the slum of legs.”

Before the Danish designer Jens Risom (also Knoll’s first designer) left Knoll to join the U.S. Army in 1943, he created many furniture designs for Knoll, including the iconic bent wood and parachute webbing lounge chair, which helped create the Knoll legend. A whole suite of Risom’s furniture designs made its appearance in the last season of Severance, as part of the Ganz College interior.

The ubiquitous adjustable office chair, too, is a Knoll design from the 2000s. The company launched its “Work from Home” collection in 2021 after the COVID-19 pandemic blurred the lines between offices and homes.

Knoll, still headquartered in East Greenville, continues to be guided by Hans and Florence Knoll’s modern vision of creating style “shaped in part by necessity,” said Auscherman.

“The foundation laid in the 1940s wasn’t just about style; it was about designing for a new world.”

And it all started a little more than 50 miles from Philadelphia.

📍Philadelphia Museum of Art, 📅 through Sept. 1, 🌐 philamuseum.org