DOMESTIC ANIMALS

When Florence Knoll designed her original credenzas for Knoll in 1961, she intended them for the office: precise, architectural storage systems for files, papers, and whatever else belonged in an orderly mid-century office. One thing she probably never thought of them as was domestic pets. Yet that is precisely what architect Sam Chermayeff had in mind when he began reworking the system for contemporary life. “We resized the Florence Knoll office furniture so that they become about the body as an object,” Chermayeff says. “Some of them become taller and skinnier, shorter and fatter. They become like little creatures that are talking to you. You put them together and it’s like a little animal farm.”

It was Knoll’s creative director Jonathan Olivares who approached Chermayeff about doing something with the archive. The resulting Knoll Chermayeff Storage collection keeps the basic vocabulary of Florence Knoll’s original — steel profiles, flush cabinetry, marble tops — while shifting its proportions, functions, and, crucially, its relationship to the body. The credenza lineage expands into a bookcase, bar cabinet, console, coffee table, and side table, with cases available in wood veneer as well as deep red, green, and blue lacquer. Some of the changes are simply practical. “They need to be a little bit deeper to hold your coat instead of files,” Chermayeff explains, “a little bit higher to put your keys on, and a little lower to be a coffee table.” But for him, the change of use also produces a change in character. Office furniture, he argues, can operate at the scale of systems; domestic objects inevitably enter into a more intimate relationship with the human body. (For more of Chermayeff's thoughts on domesticity, read his interview with Frida Escobedo for PIN–UP 39.)

The collection was photographed in Chermayeff’s own Berlin home, surrounded by his books, objects, and the accumulated stuff of everyday life. Despite taking Florence Knoll’s rigor in a more playful direction, Chermayeff sees the project as an extension rather than a correction. “I love this system for being able to withstand a lot of different expressions,” he says. “It’s generous in that way, and even though I took it on a little walk, it’s still Florence’s thing.”