Architect and furniture and textile designer, Florence Knoll was in charge of Knoll International (see Knoll Associates), a leading American furniture design company, from 1953 to 1965. She studied at the progressive Cranbrook Academy from 1934 to 1935, at the School of Architecture at Columbia University, and again at Cranbrook in the following years before going on to study at the Architectural Association in London in 1937 to 1938. Consolidating her commitment to a Modernist aesthetic she worked in the offices of the German emigré architect-designers Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1940. After further studies and a brief period in a New York architectural practice she joined the Hans G. Knoll Company in 1943, with responsibility for the Planning Unit. She married Hans Knoll in 1946 and they founded Knoll Associates with a showroom in Madison Avenue in New York. She was very much the driving force in design policy with her prestigious contacts such as Breuer, Gropius, Mies Van Der Rohe, and Eero Saarinen, whose designs were all produced by the company, as well as textile designs by the Bauhaus-trained German émigré Anni Albers and others. She gave up her links with the company in 1965.