I didn’t really realize Harry was a well-known sculptor/designer until I was an adult, so his fame did not affect me growing up. I knew he was doing important work when we would visit the shop and see one of his monumental architectural commissions. The way he spoke about his sculptures with a sort of humble pride, how comfortable he seemed in the shop and how he joked with his assistants all indicated to me that he loved his work.

I was almost two years old when my father’s Petal Table was introduced by Knoll in the Los Angeles showroom in 1960. My father always told us that we must do something we loved as a career, and for him, his love of design was infectious.

Growing up, I didn’t think I liked modernist architecture. I disliked Le Corbusier’s La Tourette, and Mies van der Rohe’s glass boxes, and I didn’t like lifeless gray concrete. It was only in graduate school that I discovered the thinking behind it.

One of the benefits of growing up in a home with a strong and distinctive architectural character is that it almost inevitably imparts an innate sense of design and spatial awareness to the people who live there.