The talents who narrate the most recent history of Knoll today are highly acclaimed architects and designer, of course, but there is also something more. What brings together such unique, different personalities – such as Koolhaas, Lissoni, Barber & Osgerby, just to name a few – is the ability to create products that express the Zeitgeist, the spirit of our time, with the ambition to go beyond it, to look into the future. The furnishings they design are very different from each other, not created in continuity with their peers, yet they are perfectly capable of establishing a dialogue, in harmony with the great Knoll classics, from Saarinen to Mies van der Rohe.
To do this, they must have the ability to be simultaneously inside and outside their own time, immersed in the cultural context but ready to break free of it, to observe it from a wider perspective. Which means knowing the difference between a signature language and a style or a passing fashion. The phonemes of this language can exist in an international and cosmopolitan dimension, proudly representing the particular cultures they channel. This is why the dialogue between works of different eras, in a Knoll setting, is never strident, always harmonious: each item brings its own character, in a sharing of design visions that enriches, creating distinction without separation.