Design Revolutionary

Today I read an obituary of the woman who, among other things, revolutionized the display of fabric swatches by stapling them on cardboard so they could be fanned out for clients to touch and compare. Such a small innovation, but one that touches any of us who've dealt with paint chips or carpet samples.

Florence Knoll Bassett, who died a few days ago at the age of 101, did far more than this. She opened up offices and honed their interiors down into a simple, spare style. An architecture critic said she "did more than another other single figure to create the modern, sleek, postwar American office." That would be any office from Mad Men till now.

I'm fascinated to learn about people who've had an outsize impact on how we live and work, and Florence Knoll Bassett fills that bill. But Knoll Bassett's work was hardly unknown to others. When her parents died, she was taken in by the architect Eliel Saarinen (father of Eero, chief designer of the Dulles Airport and the St. Louis Gateway Arch) and she trained under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

Knoll Bassett once called her furniture designs "meat and potatoes." But it was plainly much more. It was the vast array of a modern palate.

(Photo: Knoll)