Florence Knoll Bassett, architect and pioneer of modern interior design, dies at 101

The planning unit was the engine of the firm's success, offering a unique service of professional space planning services and original furniture to a growing number of important corporate clients. After Hans Knoll died in a car crash in 1955, she became president of the company, and continued to spearhead many innovations, such as the Saarinen pedestal furniture collection, and completed large-scale interior projects for companies like Connecticut General Life Insurance, Heinz and CBS, which exemplified the best in postwar design in the United States. Florence Knoll Bassett is one of the most influential architects and designers of postwar America who created the modern profession of interior design in America, and certain standards in the interior design profession that owe a debt to her: the paste-up was an abstraction and collage of the project space representing the arrangement of groupings of furniture, fabrics, window treatments, as well as an indication of the materials palette that was being proposed; she standardized square swatches of fabrics as samples; and she made designers like Eero Saarinen and Mies van der Rohe famous for their furniture-designs that are today considered classics (along with her own pieces)- and still being used today in contemporary interiors.