Now, tomorrow, forever

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.

When they are individually analyzed, the voices in this chorus become very personal. The Gould Sofa by Piero Lissoni and his Grasshopper table, but also the KN Collection, for example, play the role of a great tenor, able to follow the orchestra but also to perform magnificent arias. They are timeless classics, no less than the creations of the great masters. They are the heirs of the motto Modern Always that has always indicated the objective of the company and its interpreters. A younger voice is that of the Smalto table by Barber & Osgerby, which has the lightness in dialogue with the greats of the past that only new generations of talent can possess, without succumbing to the burden of responsibility implied by such an important legacy.

Soloists and choristers, protagonists and players are well aware of the fact that their parts are complementary and indispensable for the others. As in the famous, brilliant concept of “meat and potatoes” suggested by Florence Knoll. In 2013 the company began an ongoing collaboration with an outstanding exponent of our contemporary world: Rem Koolhaas with his studio OMA. The Dutch architect has designed what is decidedly an accent piece, in perfect continuity with his architectural thinking and his visionary theories. Tools for Life is not a work that follows the score of the customary typologies; it is a true device for activation of functions and relationships.

Not a sofa, a counter, a table or a bench, but all these articles put together, and much more. The engagement with users and their cultural codes of interpretation becomes fundamental, as in Koolhaas’s works of architecture, summoning them to become an active part of the functions that can be triggered by a product that is in some ways unpredictable and mutable. The architect explains: “We wanted to create a line of furnishings that would lend itself to precise but at the same time unexpected uses, furniture that not only contributes to the interior but also to its animation.”

The possibility Knoll offers designers, in fact, is to intervene with their pieces to formulate new ways of living and different functions of space. The versatility can be that of furnishings that adapt to a wide range of contexts, not only due to a question of ‘style.’ Modernity expressed in a temporal continuum reveals constantly innovative ways to respond to the issues raised by our needs in time. The need, for example, to create an office environment with a strong presence of the human and personal factor is addressed both by the classics of Florence Knoll and Eero Saarinen from the 1950s, and in the proposals of the present.