Of all furniture pieces, the chair could be paramount. While most other forms (save the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair is meant to be viewed here in the most general sense, from stool to throne to further makes such as a bench or sofa, which might be looked upon as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not clearly definitive.
The social history of the chair is as interesting as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not only a physical support and aesthetic item; it can also be a symbol of social rank. From the past royal courts there were social differences between sitting on a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, and having to make do with a stool. During the 20th century, a director’s and manager’s chair has become a symbol of superior standing, and even in democratic government debate the speaker sits on an elevated level.
In its furniture construction, the chair encompasses a wealth of different purposes. There are chairs created to match man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to connotate his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since past days there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs used for ending life (the electric chair). There are 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 up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our modern lifestyle has developed unique chairs for automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair forms has changed to suit to differing human desires. Due to its unique relationship with man, the chair comes to its full significance only when in use. Whereas it does not make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau if there might be things inside or not, a chair is really seen and fairly regarded with a person sitting on it, because chair and sitter need the other. Thus the various limbs of a chair are named as the areas of a human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the primary job of your chair is to support a body, its worth is valued generally by how well it measures up to this practical use. In the structure of a chair, the builder is bound for certain static regulations and principal measurements. Through these regulations, however, the chair maker has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair covered dates of several thousand years. There were peoples that had made iconic chair forms, as expressions of the highest endeavour in the industries of handling and aesthetics. In these such cultures, a mention 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 ascendancy of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the objects of careful design, are today found from discoveries made in tombs. First of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair has four legs designed not unlike those of a chosen animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. From this design a stable triangular form was obtained. There appears to be no notable differentiation between the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical citizens. The general change lied in the intricacy of its ornamentation, in the evidence of pricier inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all likelihood was created as an easily stored seat for soldiers. As a camp stool that chair stayed around for much later periods of time. But the stool also then was made as the task of a ceremonial seat, its original task as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can from today’s evidence be noted, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, executed in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are in the shape of folding stools but can’t be folded because the seats were created out of wood. The plain build of the folding stool, made of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, came up somewhat later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognised of these is the folding stool, crafted from ashwood, which is now at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The iconic Greek chair, the klismos, is found not with any ancient specimen still existing but as seen from a large amount of pictorial material. The most well known is the klismos displayed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location by Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those legs were shown. These curved legs were considered to be executed in bent wood and were in that case bore huge pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints attaching the legs to the frame of the seat had to be therefore very solid and were visibly drawn.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek designs; existing models of seated Romans are designs of a heavier and are a kind of crudely constructed klismos. Both types, the light or the heavy, were popularised in the Classicist epoch. The klismos style is found in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in particular kinds of profound individuality in Denmark and Sweden during 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China can not be tracked as well as that of Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full collection of drawings and paintings has been preserved, with images of the interior and outside of Chinese households and the kinds of furniture. Preserved also from the 16th century are a trove of chairs of wood or lacquered wood, that bear an amazing similarity to images of older chairs.
As was the case in Egypt, there were two iconic chair forms in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. This chair was constructed both with or without arms although always having a square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to support the back. In one image, though, the stiles were delicately curved over the arms for the purpose of fit the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of the back). All three sections had been mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the innovation of this back splat exercised a foundation for English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that only to a restricted ability reinforce corner joints (and then are loose to top that off) indicate an element solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which stops about the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or is given rounded edges—acknowledging as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and had on occasion a plaited form. These chairs required of the sitter to be stiff and upright; when too much weight is exerted on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall over. In patriarchal Chinese households of this era armchairs most likely were reserved only for elderly persons, for they were held in great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have taken to China from the West. It is not dissimilar so very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a variation in that the top rail is intricately held to the two legs of the stool by use of a curved member, which is usually provided with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the resulting effect of both of these furniture styles is stylized. The manufacture and decorative elements are combined in a style that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is a result of the way that the individual parts do not look to have been put together by either glue or screws, but were mortised onto one another and locked into position in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also had its mark on the chair. Paintings display a type of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, possessing two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between the layers, stitched to bring up a pattern of small pads. The front board and a similar board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. Thus the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture for traveling which, in the same time, possessed the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair can be displayed in engravings of the interior of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this type of chair is also found in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not decided that the style actually was instigated in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slender measurements; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in considerable amounts, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a row of these chairs lined up against a wall. The form asserts itself by virtue of its harmonious proportions and delicate upholstery in gilt leather or fabric bordered with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature of styles—that is to say, as developed in Paris around 1750—disseminated over most of Europe and was imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The style owes the popularity to a combination of comfort and delicacy. The seat adheres to the human body and grants a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Generally 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 strongly constructed on craftsmanlike methodology despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof are constructed from wood of rather thick dimensions; but each member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been removed, and more upmarket chairs would be further embellished with special delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is generally used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is occasionally used instead of upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more varied in design than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which came from the highest circles in Paris and Versailles throughout most of France and became the preference in many 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 commonly known and was widely distributed throughout the world.
Late 18th to 20th century
In 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 products 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.
For a great deal on executive furniture in Sydney contact Fast Office Furniture today and check our specials.
Tangalooma Island Resort is an earthly haven situated in Tangalooma, Queensland in Australia. Formerly, it was a whaling station and was formed into an island vacation hotspot because of its unique flora and fauna and its spectacular views. Couples or families looking for a good holiday destination would undoubtedly cherish a Tangalooma Island Resort holiday.
Hawaii is home to many beautiful vacation destinations and holiday bookings to these tropical islands can be made by Travel Online. This iconic tourist destination is well-known for its pristine beaches, moderate climate, world-standard shopping facilities, and unique Polynesian culture.