190 - Florence Knoll: Total Design

The Kitchen Sisters Present

The Kitchen Sisters & Radiotopia

Society & Culture

4.6 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 17 May 2022

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

As an architect, Florence Knoll was the force behind the seamless integration of furniture, space, textile, art, graphic design into a perfect brand concept: Total Design. She revolutionized office design and bringing modernist design to office interiors. She defined the modern corporate interiors of post-war America. Take a listen to this little known story of an amazing, little known architect and designer. Her influence transcends the specific disciplines, she was the force integrating them, and in her work at the Knoll Planning Unit, she promulgated the values that still motivate architects and designers today: solve the program with scale and detailing appropriate to the interior in support of how people behave in the active environment.

This story was produced by New Angle: Voice of the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation with host Cynthia Phifer Kracauer, AIA. Podcast production by Brandi Howell.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Radio Topia. Welcome to the Kitchen Sisters presents PRX. We are the Kitchen Sisters,
0:07.1	Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva. The people who make our fellow radio topia show
0:12.2	everything is alive, the interview show in which all the subjects are inanimate objects
0:17.1	are bringing you something different this year. Right now in the everything is alive feed,
0:22.0	you'll find a brand new special series called The Animals, an interview show in which all the
0:26.8	subjects are animals. You'll get to know a beaver, a jellyfish, a flamingo, and more,
0:33.0	all sharing the trials and tribulations of what it's like to live elsewhere in the food chain.
0:37.9	Like everything is alive, it's funny, informative, and poignant. Here's a sample.
0:43.2	My name is Jerija and you can see me okay? Okay, good. I'm a jellyfish, so that's why I always
0:50.9	check with people. We're celebrities in the natural world. You know, that's the thing about
0:54.8	being a butterfly that I don't think people understand is the pressure. This is my son Joseph
0:59.4	and we are kangaroos. Joseph, we should say you are currently still in the pouch. Yeah, I live in
1:06.8	the pouch still. Okay, it's awesome. It's like nature's pocket. Humans have a phrase,
1:12.4	eager beaver. Are you not a slur? I never know if that's a slur. When I look at a peacock, I don't
1:17.9	see the king of birds. I see a woefully inconvenient animal. Imagine you snuggled up in a blanket
1:24.8	but that blanket was your mother and it was just love.
1:38.4	Find the animals and the everything is alive podcast feed now.
1:44.3	Florence and I was putting the finishing touches on the largest undertaking of her career,
1:55.9	a new building for CBS in Manhattan. It consisted of more than a thousand offices and she said,
2:02.8	I'm not a decorator. The only place I decorate is my own house. She was part of a generation
2:08.3	of interior designers who were trying to professionalize their line of work. They were distinguishing
2:13.4	themselves by the kinds of spaces they designed. They designed offices, not houses. It was a way of
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Kitchen Sisters & Radiotopia, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Kitchen Sisters & Radiotopia and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.