In 1941, she moved to New York City, where she began working for furniture producer Hans Knoll. The two married in 1946 and the following year she founded the textile division for Knoll, Inc and began to design her now- iconic modernist upholstery fabrics. After Hans died in a tragic car accident in Cuba in 1955, she took over as president of the company, and created over 100 furniture designs including her revolutionary Planning Unit. Her designs were featured in several shows at the Museum of Modern Art, New York including both of the famed Good Design exhibitions. In addition to designing furniture, Knoll also had an innate eye for the work of other modern designers, and she licensed seminal forms such Harry Bertoia’s Diamond Chair and Isamu Noguchi’s Cyclone Table for Knoll.
In 1960, she resigned as president of the company to focus on the development and design departments later retiring in 1965. In 1977, Knoll was awarded the Total Design award by the American Society of Interior Designers. In 1985, she was inducted into the Interior Designers Hall of Fame and honored with a retrospective of her career at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2004 which she herself curated. In 2010, the Bard Graduate Center in New York devoted a show to her textile creations. Florence Knoll’s work rests in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Cooper Hewitt Museum of Design among many others. In January of 2019, Knoll passed away at the age of 101.
