1986 – Coconut Grove, Florida & Jeffersonville, Vermont
Florence Knoll Bassett received her Bachelor of Architecture degree from Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where she studied with Mies van der Rohe. She joined the late Hans Knoll in New York to form the Knoll Planning Unit. They were married in 1946. She became the president of Knoll International and was responsible for the space planning of the interiors of many large projects, including university dormitories, banks, office buildings and Knoll showrooms throughout the world. Two of her most widely published projects were the Connecticut General Life Insurance building in Bloomfield, Connecticut and the CBS building in New York City. She was named President’s Fellow and awarded the Athena Medallion by the Rhode Island School of Design in 1983, was appointed to the Illinois Institute of Technology Hall of Fame in 1982, elected an Honorary Member of the Industrial Designers Society of America in 1982, awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Fine Arts by Parsons School of Design in 1979 and given the Total Design Award by the American Society of Interior Designers in 1977. She received the Illinois Institute of Technology Professional Achievement Award in 1969, the International Design Award from the American Institute of Interior Designers in 1962 and the first Gold Medal Award ever awarded to a woman by the American Institute of Architects, in 1961.
