Jens Risom, Knoll's first designer, was profiled in New York Magazine's fashion blog the Cut. The piece, published on April 5 in anticipation of the designer's May birthday and latest project, tells the story of Risom's arrival in the United States in 1939 and his breakthrough meeting with Hans Knoll.
Jens Risom is inextricable from Knoll's earliest history, and he is widely credited with bringing what is now familiar Scandinavian modernism to America. In 1943, Knoll debuted Risom's breakthrough design, a curved wooden chair with cotton parachute straps; the design arose from the resource pinch on metals during the Second World War. It joined what was then called 600 Series, Risom's complete line of simple modern chairs, tables and storage that could be made locally and with unrationed materials–design principles that resonate today.