Knoll Lecture in Design: Jonathan Olivares

Jonathan Olivares

Join us on Wednesday, March 22 for the 2023 Annual Knoll Lecture in Design. This year’s lecture will be presented by Jonathan Olivares, Design Director of Knoll. The lecture will be held in deSalle Auditorium at Cranbrook Art Museum and is free and open to the public. 

Olivares has a rich practice that creates designs incorporating a legacy of form and technology that ask to be used, rather than observed. He became the Design Director of Knoll in 2022, after an illustrious career that began in 2006 with the establishment of his own industrial design practice, based in Los Angeles.

His projects include a showroom for Kvadrat (New York City, 2022); a retail store for Camper (Rockefeller Center, 2019); the installations Brujas Training Facility (Performance Space New York, 2018); Room for a Daybed (Kortrijk Biennale Interieur, 2016); the Aluminum Bench (Zahner,2015); the Vitra Workspace, an office furniture showroom and learning environment (Vitra, 2015); the exhibition Source Material, curated with Jasper Morrison and Marco Velardi (2014); and the Olivares Aluminum Chair (Knoll, 2012).

In 2011, Olivares was awarded Italy’s Compasso d’ Oro and his work is included in the permanent design collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Art Museum, and the Vitra Design Museum. In 2018, powerHouse Books published Jonathan Olivares Selected Works, a monograph containing his furniture designs, interior spaces, exhibitions, and essays.

While at Cranbrook, Olivares will meet with students in the 3D Design department to review their work and discuss design ideas.

The Knoll Lecture in Design was established in 2004 by Knoll, the residential furnishings company founded by Cranbrook Academy of Art graduate Florence Schust and her husband Hans Knoll. Each year, the endowed Knoll Lecture Fund brings the world’s most distinguished and innovative designers and thinkers to the Cranbrook campus to speak about their practice and to work with tomorrow’s design leaders studying at the Academy. Past speakers have included Steven Haulenbeek, Aldo Bakker, Martino Gamper, Bertjan Pot, Lindsey Adelman, Stefano Caggiano, and many others.