"Man evolved with time, and along with him, his couch." — A. Kurian

WK-Wohnen, an outgrowth of the Deutsche Werkstäten of Karl Schmidt, was founded in 1912 as a model association of German furniture manufacturers with a shared vision and marketing strategy embracing modernity and the machine age. The nearly 400 photographs in these four massive albums document the success of that vision: a design aesthetic at the peak of refinement, the legacy of the early twentieth-century avant-garde evolved into mass-produced bourgeois splendor for a German and European middle class on the verge of the second World War.
Three of the four albums feature uncredited but fully staged and furnished room vignettes: Speisezimmer (dining rooms), Herrenzimmer (gentlemen's studies), and Schlafzimmer (bedrooms). The fourth, Klein Möbel Sitz. u. Polstermöbel (small furniture, seating, and upholstered furniture) shows individual furniture models from designers such as Albrecht & Mamm[e]le, Bock & Feil, Kimpel, Bertram Schrot, Gärter & Nietzner, Schäfer & Kirsch, and, most notably, Wilhelm Knoll and Walter Knoll.
Walter Knoll, the figure at the center of the Knoll design dynasty and one of the shapers of 20th century modernity, was the son of Wilhelm Knoll, leather purveyor to the House of Württemberg and manufacturer of Germany's first leather-upholstered club chairs. But by 1925, Walter Knoll had left the original family business to found his own company, becoming an enthusiastic proponent of the Bauhaus style and participating in Mies van der Rohe's landmark 1927 Die Wohnung exhibition; by the time of these photographs, his firm was well-established and flourishing alongside the one he had departed. In the same year of 1937, Walter Knoll & Co. relocated from Stuttgart to Herrenberg, while Walter's son Hans in turn left his own father's company and emigrated to America, where with Florence Knoll Bassett he would exert an immense influence on American design that persists today. The Walter Knoll company likewise still operates, self-defined as "The Furniture Brand of Modernity," standing on a century and a half of well-earned design prestige and honoring the "urbane gentleman" whose name they carry on, and whose early work and influences are extensively documented in these albums.
A spectacular collection of pre-war European design, full of disconcertingly familiar shapes in a lost world, poised midway between the revelatory Bauhaus and the dominance of the mid-century modern world to come.

Read more: Sandra Hofmeister, "Traditions and Visions: Happy Birthday, Walter Knoll"; Fred Bernstein, "100 Years Ago, Walter Knoll Bet Big on Modernist Furniture"; W. Owen Harrod "The Deutsche Werkstätten and the Dissemination of Mainstream Modernity."