Knolling began as a pragmatic gesture of visual order. In 1987, Andrew Kromelow, working as a janitor in Frank Gehry’s furniture shop, started lining up scattered tools at right angles so they could all be seen at once, a practice he called “knolling” because it echoed the angular look of Knoll furniture. The point was not decoration but legibility, a work surface that made relations visible in a single glance. That shift from clutter to configuration is what turns knolling from a shop habit into a way of thinking about systems.
