Knoll - Alexander Girard H41 walnut coffee table

Alexander Girard described himself as "a reasonable and sane functionalist, tempered by irrational frivolity." The Model 108 Coffee Table, introduced to the Knoll catalog in 1948, reflects the playful spirit he injected into the often austere modern vocabulary.

Alexander Girard

Alexander Girard; Born in 1907 in New York City, he was one of the leading figures of postwar American design, along with his close friends and colleagues George Nelson and Charles & Ray Eames. The main focus of his wide-ranging work was textile design. The designer has created numerous fabrics for the Herman Miller Company, favoring abstract shapes and geometric patterns in a wide variety of color compositions. Many of his upholstery fabrics remain as timely and vital as ever and are still produced and used by Vitra today.

After studying architecture, he made a name for himself over his long career in the fields of furniture, exhibition, interior and graphic design. Furthermore, he was one of the foremost collectors of folk art in the world. Multifaceted, extremely creative, he was recently celebrated in the exhibition “Alexander Girard. A Designer's Universe” at the Vitra Design Museum. After the designer's death in 1993, his heirs donated the Girard archive (including hundreds of drawings, prototypes and samples) to the Vitra Design Museum. In 2016/17, the museum staged the exhibition “Alexander Girard: A Designer's Universe”.

Knoll

Knoll uses modern design to connect people to their work, to their lives, to their world. Since 1938, it has been internationally recognized for creating furniture for work and residential environments.

For more than 80 years Knoll has remained true to the Bauhaus design philosophy that modern furniture should complement the architectural space. At Knoll, modern design has been the guiding principle and this passion has been shared by customers and design professionals around the world. The founders, Hans and Florence Knoll, embraced the creative genius of the time.  Supported schools were Bauhaus School and Cranbrook Academy of Art to create new types of furniture and workplace environments.

Their approach, where craftsmanship joins technology through the use of design, sets the perspective and shapes the values that live today. 80 years of historical collaborations, with pioneering modernists and daring contemporary designers, define not only the past but the future through active, recent and future collaborations with Antenna Design, Don Chadwick, Formway Design, Jehs & Laub, Joseph D'Urso , David Adjaye and OMA.