Florence Knoll Bassett, 101, Designer of the Modern American Office, Dies
Florence Knoll Bassett in 1961. For 20 years she was instrumental in building Knoll Associates into the largest and most prestigious high-end design firm of its kind.CreditRay Fisher/The LIFE Images Collection, via Getty Images
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Florence Knoll Bassett in 1961. For 20 years she was instrumental in building Knoll Associates into the largest and most prestigious high-end design firm of its kind.CreditCreditRay Fisher/The LIFE Images Collection, via Getty Images
- Jan. 25, 2019
Florence Knoll Bassett, a pioneering designer and entrepreneur who created the modern look and feel of America’s postwar corporate office with sleek furniture, artistic textiles and an uncluttered, free-flowing workplace environment, died on Friday in Coral Cables, Fla. She was 101.
Her death was announced by David E. Bright, a spokesman for Knoll Inc., the company she and her husband Hans Knoll ran for many years.
To connoisseurs of Modernism, the mid-20th-century designs of Florence Knoll, as she was known, were — and still are — the essence of the genre’s clean, functional forms. Transcending design fads, they are still influential, still contemporary, still common in offices, homes and public spaces, still found in dealers’ showrooms and represented in museum collections.
Ms. Knoll learned her art at the side of Modernist masters. She was a protégé of the German-American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Eliel Saarinen, the Finnish architect and teacher and the father of the architect Eero Saarinen. And she worked with the renowned Bauhaus architects Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. Throughout her career, influenced by the German Bauhaus school of design, she promoted the Modernist merger of architecture, art and utility in her furnishings and interiors, especially — although not exclusively — for offices.
In the 1940s, she married and became a business partner of the German-born furniture maker Hans Knoll, and over 20 years she was instrumental in building Knoll Associates into the largest and most prestigious high-end design firm of its kind, with 35 showrooms in the United States and around the world.
Hans and Florence Knoll around 1945.Creditvia Knoll Inc.
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Hans and Florence Knoll around 1945.Creditvia Knoll Inc.
While her husband handled business affairs, Ms. Knoll was the design force of Knoll Associates. It grew to become the leading innovator of modern interiors and furnishings in the 1950s and ’60s, transforming the CBS, Seagram and Look magazine headquarters in Manhattan, the H. J. Heinz headquarters in Pittsburgh and properties across the United States, Europe, Asia and South America, including American embassies.
Her “total design” favored open work spaces over private offices, and furniture grouped for informal discussions. It integrated lighting, vibrant colors, acoustical fabrics, chairs molded like tulip petals, sofas and desks with chrome legs, collegially oval meeting tables, and futuristic multilevel interiors, more architectural than decorative, with open-riser staircases that seemed to float in the air.
Besides doing strategic planning and designing furniture herself, Ms. Knoll recruited and hired many of the world’s best postwar designers. She staked the sculptor Harry Bertoia to two years in a studio barn to see if, working with metals, he could turn out furniture. His wire chairs became Knoll classics. She asked Eero Saarinen to design a chair “like a great big basket of pillows that I can curl up in.” He created the body-embracing “womb chair.”
She also brought designer friends and former teachers into the fold by acquiring rights to their creations, paying them commissions and royalties, and giving them credit for their designs.
Some of the 20th century’s most admired designs thus became Knoll replicas, including Isamu Noguchi’s cyclone table (1950), held up by a whorl of rods like a tornado funnel, and the Barcelona chair, the sloped leather-and-steel piece created by Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich for the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona, Spain.
Ms. Knoll, foreground, with her business partner and husband at the time, Hans Knoll, to her right, at a meeting in 1953.Creditvia the Knoll Archive
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Ms. Knoll, foreground, with her business partner and husband at the time, Hans Knoll, to her right, at a meeting in 1953.Creditvia the Knoll Archive
Even replicas of such designs were expensive to produce, involving some hand-crafting, and retail prices ran into the thousands despite Ms. Knoll’s cost controls. The frame of the Barcelona chair, for example, originally nine steel components bolted together, was designed as a seamless piece of stainless steel, and cowhide instead of pigskin was used for seat and back coverings.
“Her exactitude could be frustrating for those who worked under her,” the website LiveAuctioneers .com said of her in a profile.
But the fruit of that labor became universally known. “Every time you see Barcelona chairs and a table in a lobby, that’s her,” Kathryn Hiesinger, a curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, told The New York Times in 2004, when Ms. Knoll came out of retirement to create the museum’s exhibition “Florence Knoll Bassett: Defining Modern.”
Besides the Philadelphia museum, her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.
Some of her work is currently on display at Gracie Mansion, the residence of New York City’s mayor, as part of a yearlong exhibition titled “She Persists: A Century of Women Artists in New York,” spearheaded by the city’s first lady, Chirlane McCray.
The Florence Knoll table desk, designed in 1961, the year Ms. Knoll became the first woman to receive the Gold Medal for Industrial Design from the American Institute of Architects. Her designs are still common in offices, homes and public spaces.Creditvia the Knoll Archive
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The Florence Knoll table desk, designed in 1961, the year Ms. Knoll became the first woman to receive the Gold Medal for Industrial Design from the American Institute of Architects. Her designs are still common in offices, homes and public spaces.Creditvia the Knoll Archive
To market their merchandise, the Knolls established showrooms in Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas and other American cities, as well as in Europe, Asia and South America. They kept their New York showroom, but moved the base of operations in 1950 to East Greenville, Pa., northwest of Philadelphia.
After Mr. Knoll died in a car accident in 1955, Ms. Knoll succeeded him as president and held that post until 1960. Although she sold her interest in the company, she remained as its design director until 1965, when she retired to a private practice in architecture and design in Florida. In her last decade at Knoll, the company doubled in size and became one of the nation’s most influential design organizations.
In 1984, Paul Goldberger, then the architecture critic of The Times, wrote that Ms. Knoll “probably did more than any other single figure to create the modern, sleek, postwar American office, introducing contemporary furniture and a sense of open planning into the work environment.”
Florence Marguerite Schust was born in Saginaw, Mich., on May 24, 1917, to Frederick and Mina (Haisting) Schust. Her father, an engineer and the president of a baking company, died when she was 5, her mother when she was 12. A precocious child fascinated with architecture, Florence was virtually adopted in the 1930s by Eliel Saarinen and his wife, Loja.
She attended Kingswood, a girls’ school in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., and later its affiliate in the same city, the Cranbrook Academy of Art, a fountainhead of architecture and design. Both were residential schools for practicing artists, overseen by Eliel Saarinen. His son, Eero, also a Cranbrook student, went on to design the CBS headquarters in New York and the winged TWA Flight Center at Kennedy International Airport.
A Knoll store in Midtown Manhattan in 2013, the year it opened.CreditFred R. Conrad/The New York Times
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A Knoll store in Midtown Manhattan in 2013, the year it opened.CreditFred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Florence Schust spent summers with the Saarinens in Europe, exposed to a world of art and culture. After two years at the Architectural Association in London, she returned to the United States as World War II began. She was an apprentice for a year at Gropius & Breuer in Boston, studied at Columbia University’s School of Architecture and under Mies van der Rohe, and earned a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the Armour Institute of Technology (now the Illinois Institute of Technology) in Chicago in 1941.
She went to work for Wallace K. Harrison, the architect who helped design Rockefeller Center, the United Nations and Lincoln Center.
In 1943, she became a designer for Mr. Knoll, the scion of a family that had founded a furniture business in Germany in 1865, who had established his own furniture business in New York in 1938. They were married in 1946, and she became his partner in Knoll Associates. With her connections to architects and designers, the company expanded rapidly with its modernist collections.
After her retirement, she accepted some private clients but refused almost all interviews and public appearances.
In 1958, Ms. Knoll married Harry Hood Bassett, a Miami banker. He died in 1991.
She is survived by two stepsons, Harry Jr. and Patrick Bassett; a stepdaughter, Maia Marcq, whose father was Hans Knoll; and nine grandchildren. A third stepson, George Bassett, died in 2008.
Ms. Knoll Bassett donated her papers to the Smithsonian Institution in 2000. In 1961, she became the first woman to receive the Gold Medal for Industrial Design from the American Institute of Architects, and in 1983 she won the Athena Award of the Rhode Island School of Design.
In 2003, President George W. Bush presented her with the nation’s highest award for artistic excellence, the National Medal of Arts.
“I’ve had an extraordinary life when you think about it,” she told Metropolis magazine in 2001. “Growing up at Cranbrook, living as part of the Saarinen family. …
Apple investors brace for more bad news in latest results
Analysts say iPhone woes and struggles in China are likely to last
Apple investors are braced for more bad news when the tech giant reports its latest results on Tuesday, with analysts warning that the abrupt drop-off in iPhone sales at the end of last year could continue throughout 2019.
Shares in Apple plunged in early January when chief executive Tim Cook said that revenues in the three months to December, typically its most lucrative quarter, were likely to fall by as much as 5 per cent. Wall Street, which had previously anticipated growth of up to 5 per cent, wiped tens of billions of dollars from Apple’s market value within days.
The stock has subsequently recovered almost all of those losses. Yet many analysts remain concerned that Apple’s iPhone woes were not confined to the previous quarter and that its struggles in China go beyond macroeconomic conditions.
“This isn’t a one-off thing. I think this is a potentially year-long problem, if not longer,” said Ben Bajarin, analyst at Creative Strategies. “We don’t know where the bottom is yet [for iPhone sales].”
While Apple has already detailed the problems in its fiscal first quarter, Tuesday’s earnings report will be the first time it has provided any guidance on the rest of the year.
“We think the Street has not fully factored in the repercussions of the miss into [fiscal 2019] estimates,” said Gene Munster, a former Apple analyst turned investor with Loup Ventures. Mr Munster forecasts a 5 per cent decline in overall revenues for the year ending in September, compared with Wall Street’s estimates of about 2 per cent.
Analysts at Morgan Stanley, however, maintain that Apple’s share price already reflects an “extremely cautious” outlook for iPhone sales. The stock could rise further if Apple guides to March-quarter revenues of more than $58bn, Morgan Stanley said in a note to clients on Friday.
The current quarter includes the Chinese new year in early February, traditionally a strong driver of iPhone sales, which will test Mr Cook’s insistence that Apple has a “bright future” in China, despite blaming economic uncertainty there for its revenue shortfall.
Figures from research firm Strategy Analytics released on Friday point to competitive pressures also playing a role in Apple’s drop-off in China. Huawei increased its market share in China during the fourth quarter from 20 per cent a year ago to 27.8 per cent, while Apple saw its share decline from 11.5 per cent to 10.1 per cent. Local rivals Oppo and Vivo also increased their market share.
“Apple iPhone [unit shipments have] now fallen on a year-over-year basis in China for eight of the past 12 quarters,” said Linda Sui, director at Strategy Analytics. “Apple is in danger of pricing the iPhone out of China.”
Tuesday’s results will also be the first to be released under Apple’s new financial reporting regime. The decision to stop revealing iPhone unit sales, announced in November, had already prompted a backlash from some on Wall Street who thought that the lack of disclosures foreshadowed a deteriorating performance for Apple’s flagship product.
However, Apple has also said that it will increase disclosure in other areas, such as providing profit margin details for the first time for its online Services division, which includes iCloud, Apple Music and the App Store.
Mr Munster predicts that Apple will report a 65 per cent gross margin for Services, compared with 27 per cent for its hardware products.
Mr Cook has talked about providing new ways to incentivise existing iPhone owners to upgrade sooner, for instance by providing a larger credit for trading in their old handset.
But Mr Bajarin believes that can only have a limited impact as new smartphone features become more incremental, causing customers to hold on to their existing device for longer.
“The reality is many consumers are quite content with the iPhone they have and they will only get a new one when it breaks or slows down.
“Apple just has to wait that out,” he said. “If [replacement] life cycles are delaying, you can see it being at least a year if not multiple-year stalemate.”
Germany set to phase out coal-fired power stations by 2038
Special commission calls for €40bn support package to ease green transition
Germany is set to phase out all its coal-fired power stations by 2038, under a plan agreed by a government-appointed commission.
The keenly awaited deal, announced on Saturday, calls for massive financial transfers — worth €40bn over the next 20 years — to regions in Germany where coal mining and coal power still play a significant role.
The commission also wants Berlin to shield households and the private sector from the rise in electricity prices that is expected to follow the phase-out, a move that could cost taxpayers a further €2bn a year.
The plan — if implemented by the government in the years ahead — would see Germany join a growing number of countries around the world that have decided to end the use of coal, a key source of greenhouse gas emissions.
According to Ronald Pofalla, one of the chairmen of the commission, the proposed phase-out will allow Europe’s largest economy to meet its climate change targets for 2030, which call for a sharp cut in carbon emissions from the energy sector. “This is a historic accomplishment,” Mr Pofalla told journalists in Berlin.
Berlin has long been viewed as a laggard in the campaign to phase out coal, denting the country’s credibility as a champion in the fight against climate change. Germany is more dependent on coal than most other western economies, and still boasts a large domestic lignite mining industry. Lignite, or brown coal, is among the dirtiest fuels around — and has long been a target for green campaigners.
Germany’s energy dilemma is further exacerbated by the government’s 2011 decision to exit nuclear energy by 2022, which takes out another reliable source of power.
Power plants that run on coal and lignite currently account for about 42 gigawatts of generation capacity, and produce 40 per cent of Germany’s electricity. Under the path proposed by the commission, coal capacity would be reduced to 30 gigawatts by the end of 2022 and 17 gigawatts by the end of 2030. The lost capacity from nuclear and coal is supposed to be largely replaced by renewable sources such as wind and solar, which are set to account for 65 per cent of power generation in the country by the end of the next decade.
Environmental groups on Saturday gave a guarded welcome to the coal deal: “Germany finally has a road map towards becoming coal-free. There will not be any new coal-fired power stations,” said Martin Kaiser, the director of Greenpeace Germany. “But the [commission] report has one severe flaw: the speed is not right. To exit coal only by 2038 is not acceptable to Greenpeace.”
Business leaders said they supported the deal. “This was a difficult birth,” said Steffen Kampeter, the managing director of the BDA employers’ federation. “Now it’s up to the federal government. The actions of the government will determine whether the proposals made by the coal commission can contribute to a climate and energy policy that is sensible and measured.”
The struggle over how and when to end the use of coal and lignite has roiled German politics for years. Industry leaders warned that a hasty phase-out of coal could lead to a dramatic spike in power prices and raise the risk of black-outs. Trade unions and local politicians raised alarm about job losses, especially in parts of poorer eastern Germany where lignite mining continues to play a central role.
Green campaigners insisted, however, that a speedy end to coal power was necessary for Germany to meets it climate change goals. Berlin has committed to reducing carbon dioxide emissions from the energy sector by more than 60 per cent by 2030, using 1990 as the baseline.
Reaching the 2030 goal is seen as a priority not least because Germany has already admitted it is on track to fail its 2020 emissions targets — a severe embarrassment for a country that once prided itself on its green leadership.
In an attempt to break the deadlock, the government of Angela Merkel last year set up a special commission that included representatives of politics, industry and environmental groups. The commission had until February 1 to come up with a final report, but ended up striking a deal after a marathon session that lasted from Friday morning until the early hours of Saturday.
One of the side effects of the coal agreement is likely to be the preservation of Hambach forest, a small woodland that has become a symbol of the anti-coal movement — and the scene of mass protests last year.
Hambach was supposed to be cut down to make way for the planned expansion of a lignite mine operated by energy giant RWE in western Germany. The report itself says only that the preservation of Hambach is “desirable”. In practice, however, the commitment to shut down lignite plants with a combined capacity of 5 gigawatts by 2022 makes it highly unlikely that the mine expansion will go ahead.
Cerberus and Centerbridge seek minority stake in NordLB
Private equity groups join forces to table bid for ailing state-owned German lender
In an eleventh hour twist over the future of ailing German lenderNordLB, rival private equity groups Cerberus and Centerbridge have joined forces to table a joint bid for a minority stake in the state-owned bank.
NordLB, which is majority-owned by the German states of Lower Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt with regional saving banks holding a minority stake, is under intense pressure from European regulators to lower its exposure to toxic shipping loans and to quickly raise around €3.5bn of fresh equity.
Until Friday afternoon, when a bidding deadline for a stake in NordLB was extended by one day, Cerberus and Centerbridge had been in separate negotiations over the acquisition of a stake of up to 49 per cent in NordLB.
The state of Lower Saxony stands ready to inject money alongside the private equity investors to bolster the lender’s equity buffers.
Regulators in recent weeks signalled to the owners that a forced wind-down of the Hannover-based lender with €155bn in total assets and more than 6000 employees was the next step should the lender fail to raise the necessary capital quickly, people with first hand knowledge of the discussions told the Financial Times.
NordLB sits on non-performing shipping loans with a headline value of €7.3bn and last November was one of the three worst performers in EU banking stress tests.
Attempts to merge NordLB with Frankfurt-based Landesbank peer Helaba fell apart in late December when Helaba formally terminated the talks.
Behind the scenes, the German Savings Banks Association, the state-owners of NordLB and regional savings banks are frantically trying to engineer an alternative public-sector rescue for NordLB which would prevent the part-privatisation of Germany’s fourth-largest Landesbank, which also operates a local savings bank in the city of Braunschweig.
Senior people familiar briefed on the situation said a public sector solution was still seen as the most likely scenario. “The Sparkassen group has a tendency to find a compromise only when it’s five minutes past midnight”, one person said.
NordLB and the State of Lower Saxony on Saturday confirmed a joint bid of two private equity investors but did not name them. Two people briefed on the matter told the Financial Times that the investors were Cerberus and Centerbridge.
Cerberus is engaged in separate negotiations over the sale of NordLB’s toxic shipping portfolio, which the lender wants to hive off in a separate transaction.
Both private equity groups declined to comment.
Cerberus is already the biggest shareholder in recently privatised Landesbank HSH and among the largest investors in Germany’s largest lenders Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank, having invested an estimated total of €4bn into the country’s financial sector.
“We just don’t buy the notion that German banks cannot earn their cost of capital,” Cerberus co-chief executive Frank Bruno told the Financial Times, adding that achieving this “does not require incredibly sophisticated fixes. This is basic blocking and tackling and doing things that are being done by a lot of other banks in Europe and in the US.”
NordLB chief executive Thomas Bürkle on Saturday said that the lender would “thoroughly evaluate the offer of both investors”, adding that the way forward would be decided jointly with the lender’s owners.
Lower-Saxony’s Finance Minister Reinhold Hilbers said that the bid, which “is outlining a future vision for NordLB”, was a confirmation “that the bank has a good potential”.
Mr Bürkle and Mr Hilbers said that they were “still open for a public sector solution”.
Multinationals’ Currency Woes: A Harbinger on Global Growth?
The U.S. dollar has risen 7% against a basket of other currencies over the past year. That was a substantial headwind for three major consumer companies that reported earnings in the past week. Currency movements reduced fourth-quarter revenue by 4% at both Procter & Gamble PG -0.74% and Kimberly-Clark, and by 5% at Colgate-Palmolive . CL -0.58%
All of them highlight organic sales growth, which strips out currency movements and merger impacts, but actual profits aren’t immune to exchange rates. Colgate-Palmolive said Friday that it expects earnings per share to decline in 2019, due in part to stepped up advertising spending, but also currency impacts. The outlooks given by Kimberly-Clark and Procter & Gamble were similarly tepid.
Currency movements are difficult to interpret or predict. Even so, investors should consider what is driving the dollar’s strength. True, expectations for further Federal Reserve tightening are diminishing. That should be negative for the greenback, but it is being overwhelmed by concerns over the growth outlook in markets outside the U.S.
Those concerns have intensified recently. On Thursday, European Central Bank President Mario Draghiopened the door to fresh stimulus measures after warning that downside risks to the eurozone economy are increasing. A few days earlier, China reported is slowest annual gross domestic product growth since 1990.
Colgate-Palmolive is particularly exposed, with 78% of its sales coming from outside of North America. Other highly global consumer companies still to report quarterly earnings include Mondelez , PepsiCo PEP -0.14% and Coca-Cola . KO -0.67% If the global economy keeps slowing, even stripping out currencies won’t be enough to flatter their results.
Barrons weekend summary: positive feature on DELL
* Cover story: A look at 15 companies whose facilities have the greatest exposure to climate change and extreme weather, according to market intelligence firm Four Twenty Seven; scores are based on operations risk, market risk, and supply chain risk, based on databases of corporate facilities, as well as climate and weather data (cautious on NCLH, WDC, NEE, MU, EMN, ED, STX, MRK, AMAT, PEG, D, RCL, INCY, TROW, BMY).
* Features: 1) Companies with low debt are a good bet for investors facing an environment of slowing economic growth and elevated macro risks; Barron’s screened for companies with attractive valuations and strong returns on assets, and which have more cash than debt (Positive on GILD, KLAC, TER, GNTX); 2) Positive on DELL: Company is one of the most intriguing value plays in the market today because of its 81% stake in VMW, a fast-growing software company, as well as interests in PVTL and SCWX, worth a combined $53B, or about $19B more than Dell’s current market value of $34B; 3) In a year when most tradable assets declined in value, Barron’s had a mixed record of pointing investors toward the winners and warning them away from the losers; bullish picks trailed benchmarks by about a percentage point, but bearish calls were often spot-on.
* Tech Trader: Venture capitalist Marc Andreeson’s claim that software would disrupt large portions of the economy and nearly every industry because of the transformative effects of the cloud’s cheaper computing power has proven correct—and in a tumultuous market, enterprise software firms such as CRM remain a powerful secular investment story.
* Trader: The market has already made back a large portion of its December losses, and while the easy money has been made, valuations suggest more upside, says Citigroup chief U.S. equity strategist Tobias Levkovich. Interview: Shawn Kravetz of Esplanade Capital Partners manages $30M and likes what he calls OUCH stocks: out-of-fashion, undiscovered or underfollowed, cheap, and hated, which has recently included gaming stocks (picks: PENN, GDEN, CNTY, AZRE).
* Profile: Dan Davidowitz, lead manager of the Polen Growth fund, one of Barron’s top-ranked sustainable mutual funds, doesn’t focus specifically on ESG investing, but looks for companies with strong financial performance that have the resources to be good stewards and employers (top 10 holdings: MSFT, GOOG, V, FB, ORLY, ADP, ADBE, NKE, SBUX, ZTS).
* Emerging Markets: Cautious on Tencent Holdings: Investors seem unconvinced that the maturing company can maintain the youthful growth spurt that its stock valuation reflects, and U.S. giants may be a better buy after their recent selloff.
* Economy and Policy: The Chinese economy has done an exemplary job of boosting its labor and capital inputs since Deng Xiaoping began the process of “reform and opening up” in 1978, but the long boom is over: Persistent weaknesses in productivity growth and a looming demographic catastrophe will hobble the country for decades to come.
* Commodities: “Palladium started the year on a positive note, with futures prices already up by more than 10% after hefty gains in the last three years. Better yet, analysts are upbeat about the long-term prospects for the metal.”Streetwise: CEOs in banking, manufacturing, and retail say they have made expensive operational changes to prepare for worst-case trade war and Brexit scenarios—moving production from China to Vietnam and India, or relocating London-based trading and banking operations, which are sunk costs that won’t be reversed, even if 25% tariffs or a hard Brexit don’t come to pass.