Florence Knoll described her designs as the meat and potatoes, the fill-in pieces which had to be provided. "I needed the piece for a job and it wasnt there, so I designed it." While this may have been the motivation for the 1961 Table Desk, the perfectly proportioned and flawlessly detailed result is anything but a fill-in piece.
Share
Table Desks are available as oval or circular tables. The Florence Knoll Desk is available with a rectangular top and two pencil drawers. KnollStudio logo and Florence Knoll's signature are stamped into base of table.
Frame and legs heavy gauge welded steel.
Tops available as veneer, marble or glass.
Base available in polished or satin chrome.
Top available in white laminate, veneer finishes, frosted glass, or marble options. The Rectangular Desk is available with wooden top only.
Large oval 244cm W x 137cm D x 71cm H.
Small oval 198cm W x 121 cm D x 71cm H.
Round 137cm D x 71cm H.
Rectangular 200cm W x 100cm D x 74cm H.
As head of the Knoll Planning unit, Florence Knoll always approached furniture design with the larger space in mind. Most important to her was how a piece fit into the greater design — the room, the floor, the building. Every element of a Knoll-planned space supported the overall design and complemented the existing architecture.
Never one to compromise, Florence would often design furniture when she, “needed the piece of furniture for a job and it wasn’t there.” And while she never regarded herself as a furniture designer, her quest for harmony of space and consistency of design led her to design several of Knoll’s most iconic pieces of furniture—all simple, none plain. As skyscrapers rose up across America during the post-war boom, Florence Knoll saw it as her job to translate the vocabulary and rationale of the modern exterior to the interior space of the corporate office. Thus, unlike Saarinen and Bertoia, her designs were architectural in foundation, not sculptural. She scaled down the rhythm and details of modern architecture while humanising them through colour and texture. Her occasional table collection, designed in 1954 to complement her eponymous lounge collection, is a perfect example of her restrained, geometric approach to furniture, clearly derived from her favourite mentor, Mies van der Rohe.
While a student at the Kingswood School on the campus of the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, Florence Knoll Bassett (née Schust) became a protegée of Eero Saarinen. She studied architecture at Cranbrook, the Architectural Association in London and the Armour Institute (Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago). She worked briefly for Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and Wallace K. Harrison. In 1946, she became a full business and design partner and married Hans Knoll, after which they formed Knoll Associates. She was at once a champion of world-class architects and designers and an exceptional architect in her own right. As a pioneer of the Knoll Planning Unit, she revolutionised interior space planning. Her belief in "total design" – embracing architecture, manufacturing, interior design, textiles, graphics, advertising and presentation – and her application of design principles in solving space problems were radical departures from the standard practice in the 1950s, but were quickly adopted and remain widely used today. For her extraordinary contributions to architecture and design, Florence Knoll was accorded the National Endowment for the Arts' prestigious 2002 National Medal of Arts.