From each of the furniture pieces, the chair could be paramount. While most other items (except the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair is intended to be regarded here in the common sense, from stool to throne to complex chairs like the bench or sofa, which should be viewed as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not obviously defined.
The social history of the chair is as interesting as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not simply a physical support or aesthetic creation; it is also an indicator of social place. At the historical royal courts there were important signifiers between sitting on a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, and having to make do with a stool. From the last century, the director’s and/or manager’s chair has developed a symbol of superior status, as well as in democratic governments the speaker sits on a raised platform.
As a furniture purpose, the chair can be used for a variety of different makes. There are chairs structured to fit man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). From the past there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs to die in (the electric chair). We design chairs with one, two, three, or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can make chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern day living has developed special chairs in automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair shapes has been evolved to suit to changing human requirements. From its unique relationship with man, the chair comes to its full advantage only when in use. Whereas it isn’t relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers whether there is anything inside or not, a chair is really seen best and regarded best with a person sitting on it, for chair and sitter need one another. Thus the several areas of the chair were labeled corresponding to the names of a human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the primary work of your chair is to support our body, its value is judged basically on how suitably it does fulfill this practical use. Within the design of a chair, the builder is limited with the static laws and principal measurements. In these limitations, however, the chair designer has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair extended over dates of several thousand years. There are societies that held distinctive chair types, as expressive of the highest work in the industries of handling and creativity. Out of those societies, particular note needs to be made of ancient Egypt and Greece; China; Spain and The Netherlands in the 17th century; England in the 18th century; and France in the 18th century during the lives of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the upshot of careful craft, were found from tomb discoveries. First of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair would have had four legs formed as akin to those of an animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported by vertical stretchers. From this design a solid triangular construction was crafted. There was from our understanding no notable differentiation between the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common citizens. The only difference was in the kind of ornamentation, in the choice of more expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most probably was manufactured to be an easily portable seat for officers. As a camp stool that stool persevered until much later periods of time. But the stool then was made as the role of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical role as a folding stool being forgotten. This can today be observed, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, crafted in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are made in the structure of folding stools but aren’t able to be folded as the seats were formed with wood. The simple manufacture of the folding stool, being of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric held between them, also appeared somewhat later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognised of those is the folding stool, made out of ashwood, which can now be seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not as any ancient object still around but from a trove of pictorial objects. The better known is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place by Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of them were shown. These curving legs were considered to be created of bent wood and were in that case subjected to huge pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat are therefore extremely solid and were visibly indicated.
The Romans embued the Greek style; designs of statues of seated Romans offer evidence of a heavier and in appearance kind of less delicately constructed klismos. Both designs, light and heavy, were seen again in the Classicist period. The klismos style is found in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in particular forms of considerable uniqueness of Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China can not be charted as well as the ancestry of chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken folio of sketches and paintings has been protected, showing the insides and exterior of Chinese buildings and the designs of furniture. Preserved also from the 16th century are some chairs made of wood or lacquered wood, that possess an amazing resemblance to pictures of past chairs.
Just the same as in Egypt, there existed two fundamental chair designs in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. This chair is seen both with and without arms but never without its square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to give support to the back. In one type, however, the stiles had been delicately curved over the arms so as to conform correctly to the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of a back). The three areas had been mortised on the yoke-like top rail. While the innovation of this back splat exercised a foundation for English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden members that could merely to a particular ability support corner joints (and are loose as well) signify a feature signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which stops about the rounded staves. All members are round in section or have rounded edges—referable perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and may have had a plaited seat. These chairs demanded of the sitter to stay stiff and upright; for when too much pressure is forced on the back, the chair has a way of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this epoch armchairs most likely were allowed only for senior individuals in the family, for they were respected greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have been brought to China from the West. It does not differ very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a variation in that the top rail is prettily joined to the two legs of the stool by means of a curved member, which is often seen with metal mounts. From a Western understanding the resulting effect of both these furniture styles is stylized. The constructive and decoration parts are combined in a manner that is all at once both naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is a result of the way that the individual members do not seem to have been affixed by means of either glue or screws, but are mortised onto one another and fixed in place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also had its signature on the chair. Works of art show a kind of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between, stitched to produce a pattern of little pads. The front board and a related board from the back could be folded after loosening some little iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture while traveling which, at the same period, granted the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair can be displayed in engravings of the inside of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this kind of chair might also be found in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not determined that the design actually began in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slender measurements; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in large numbers, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which a whole row of such chairs lined up against a wall. The design asserts itself by virtue of its harmonious proportions and delicate upholstery in gilt leather or fabric edged with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature style—that is to say, as progressed in Paris around 1750—conquered most of Europe and has been imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The style owes such popularity to a combination of relaxation and delicacy. The seat conforms to the human body and allows a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Usually the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are solidly constructed on craftsmanlike principles even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them employ wood of rather thick dimensions; but all members are deeply molded, all extra wood has been cut away, and more expensive examples would be further embellished with very delicate and decorative carving. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry may be used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is occasionally used in place of upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more variable in form than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and was popularised in several parts of the Continent, had no parallel in England. Prior to 1740, the most commonly used wood was walnut; thereafter, and for the rest of the century, it was mahogany. Walnut, though beautiful in hue, was soft and therefore less suited to wood carving than to rounded, curving forms. Outer surfaces, such as the back and seat frame, were usually veneered. During the walnut period, highly overstuffed armchairs, covered with leather or embroidered material, were also developed. The best upholstery of this period is precisely and firmly modelled and accentuated by braiding or tacks. When imports of mahogany became common, no specifically new chair designs appeared, but the character of the woodwork changed. Mahogany, having a firmer, closer grain, could be cut thinner, which meant that individual parts of the chair could be more slender in shape. Mahogany also lent itself better to carving than walnut. Carving was concentrated more on the arms and back than on the legs, which as a rule were straight and smooth with chamfered (bevelled) edges and molding. There was a wealth of variety in chairback designs, featuring elegant, pierced, vase-shaped splats or two upright posts connected by horizontal slats (ladderback).
Alongside the French Rococo chair and the best English chairs in walnut and mahogany, the stick-back chair was relatively unaffected by the stylistic changes of the day. Originally a medieval form, known, for example, from paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder and still found in mid-20th century in the churches and inns of southern Europe, the stick-back chair (in all of its variations) consists basically of a solid, saddle-shaped seat into which the legs, back staves, and possibly the armrests are directly mortised. This typically peasant form underwent a renewal and a process of refinement in England and America during the 18th century. Under the name Windsor chair (a term that seems to have been used for the first time in 1731) or Philadelphia chair, it became popularised and was widely distributed throughout the world.
Late 18th to 20th century
Within the Neoclassical period, no basic changes took place in chair forms, but legs became straight and dimensions lighter. Backs in the shape of classical vases replaced the fanciful outlines of the Rococo period. Around 1800, freely executed imitations of Greek and Roman chairs of the klismos type, with curved legs and backrest, appeared. French chairs of the Empire period, executed in dark mahogany and embellished with ornate bronze mounts, created a ponderous effect.
In cheaper styles of inferior workmanship, bourgeois chairs of the 19th century carried on the traditions of the 17th and 18th centuries. The only real innovations were the bentwood (wood that has been bent and shaped) chairs in beech that became popular all over the world and were still made in the 20th century. Around 1900 the continental Art Nouveau and Jugendstil styles (French and German styles characterized by organic foliate forms, sinuous lines, and non-geometric forms), and the Arts and Crafts movement in England (established by the English poet and decorator William Morris to reintroduce idealized standards of medieval craftsmanship), gave rise to original chair designs by Eugène Gaillard in France, Henry van de Velde in Belgium, Josef Hoffman in Austria, Antonio Gaudí in Spain, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Scotland. These new furniture styles did not exercise wide, let alone decisive, influence. The Art Nouveau chairs designed by the French architect Hector Guimard, for example, are collector’s pieces, but his name is known to a broader public only because of his fanciful entrances to the Paris Métro.
Modern
After World War I, the Bauhaus school in Germany became a creative centre for revolutionary thinking, resulting, for example, in tubular steel chairs designed by the architects Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and others. During World War II, the aircraft industry accelerated the development of laminated wood and molded plastic furniture. The dominant chair forms of this period go back to designs by Alvar Aalto, Bruno Mathsson, and Charles and Ray Eames. Rapid technical developments, in conjunction with an ever-increasing interest in human-factors engineering, or ergonomics, purport that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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