Knoll: Editing the Avant-garde

"This is Knoll" was the proud statement in red neon at the entrance of the editor's stand at the 2016 Milan Furniture Fair. An occasion to look back at the history of the sleeping beauty, who had finally disappeared behind her furniture. "We needed to establish Knoll's identity with the public," says the CEO of the European branch, Demetrio Apolloni, "and remind them that a Saarinen, a Bertoia and a Platner is also Knoll." A long history of outstanding names that have punctuated the history of the brand and its husband-and-wife founders, Hans and Florence Knoll. Modernist Roots A highlight in the editor's annals was 1938, the year when Hans Knoll struck out on his own, just after arriving in the US to market Prodomo, the furniture line produced by his father Walter in Germany. But we could also go back a few years further, when the latter joined the Deutscher Werkbund, working with Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius before they left Europe under the rise of the Nazis. One at Harvard,…