Her talents for design and business helped popularize the International Style aesthetic in America, and perhaps more than any other designer, her work has shaped the landscape of the contemporary corporate interior.

Born Florence Schust, known as "Shu" to friends, she studied architecture at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, the Architectural Association in London, and under Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology (formerly the Armour Institute).

After taking her degree, she moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts to work for Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, both of whom had left Germany to teach at the Harvard School of Design.

In 1943, Florence took a job in New York at the Hans G. Knoll Furniture Company—at the time a small studio that primarily manufactured the work of Scandinavian designers.

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