From all the furniture needs, the chair could be of the most importance. While many other objects (apart from the bed) are devised to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair can be said here in the common sense, from stool to throne to complex chairs for example a bench and sofa, which can be seen as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not evidently distinuishable.
The social history of the chair is as stimulating as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not just a physical support and aesthetic item; it is historically a signifier of social ranking. From the historical royal courts there were clear distinctions between being seated on a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, and having to make do with a stool. Since the recent century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has been regarded as a signifier of superior position, and even in democratic governments the speaker sits on an elevated floor.
In its furniture construction, the chair encompasses a range of various purposes. There are chairs manufactured to suit man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to connotate his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). In historical days there were chairs for births (birth chairs); from the 20th century, there have been chairs for ending life (the electric chair). We design chairs with one, two, three, and four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. There are chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our contemporary lifestyle has derived new chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair kinds have been adapted to fit to growing human desires. For its significant link with man, the chair exists to its full importance only when used. Though it doesn’t make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau if there might be things inside or not, a chair is understood and fairly evaluated by a person using it, for chair and sitter need the other. Thus the individual areas of the chair were given names corresponding to the names of a human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the principal job of your chair is to support your body, its credit is evaluated generally on how completely it fulfills this practical job. Within the structure of a chair, the builder is restricted under certain static law and principal measurements. Within these regulations, however, the chair designer has extensive freedom.
The history of the chair covered an epoch of several thousand years. There existed cultures that had made distinctive chair types, expressions of the leading object in the industries of handling and design. Among these such cultures, particular 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 reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the upshot of expert craft, are a finding from discoveries made in tombs. First of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair had four legs structured similar to those of a designated animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported by vertical stretchers. From this design a strong triangular design was obtained. There was to all appearances no significant differentiation between the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular people. The only variation lied in the level of ornamentation, in the particulars of more valuable inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was created as an easily stored seat for officers. As a camp stool this kind persevered for much later points. But the stool also played the task of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical job as a folding stool neglected or forgotten. This can already be noted, 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 shape of folding stools but are not able to be folded because the seats are formed with wood. The easy build of the folding stool, being of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, is seen again somewhat later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most well known of this type is the folding stool, made of ashwood, which is now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is found not as any ancient specimen still extant but seen in a variety of pictorial material. The iconic kind is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of those legs were displayed. These creative legs were most likely to have been created from bent wood and were as such put under extreme pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore super stable and were clearly drawn.
The Romans adopted the Greek design; a number of models of seated Romans show examples of a more heavyset and apparently slightly crudely designed klismos. Both styles, the light and the heavy, were popularised within the Classicist era. The klismos influence can be evidenced in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in special types of considerable individuality of Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China cannot be tracked as far back as that of Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged collection of images and works of art was protected, displaying the interior and outside of Chinese homes and the kinds of furniture. Also kept of the 16th century are a number of chairs of wood or lacquered wood, that bear an astonishing likeness to pictures of previous chairs.
Just the same as in Egypt, there were two standard chair forms in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. This chair was constructed both with and without arms although always having the square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to firm the back. In one style, though, the stiles are delicately curved on top of the arms so as to conform to the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of a chairback). The three sections were mortised in the yoke-like top rail. Though the design of the back splat later had an inspiration for English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden items that could only to a restricted limit reinforce corner joints (and furthermore are loose to top it off) are a design signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which stops around the rounded staves. All members are round in section or is given rounded edges—referable as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and may have a plaited seat. These chairs needed the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; for when too much pressure is placed on the back, the chair has a way of toppling over. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this era armchairs likely were kept for older individuals, for they were greatly respected.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have travelled to China from the West. It is akin so very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a variation in that the top rail is delicately affixed to the two legs of the stool by a curved member, which is generally designed with metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the ultimate effect of these furniture styles is stylized. The manufacture and decoration aspects are combined in a manner that is all at once both naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is a result of the fact that the individual items do not look to have been affixed with either glue or screws, but were mortised with 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 name on the chair. Artworks project a style of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between, stitched to show up a pattern of little pads. The front board and a corresponding board at the back could be folded after loosening some little iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture for traveling which, at the same time, held the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair is found in engravings of the interiors of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this type of chair might also be seen in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not decided that the design actually originated in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of thin shape; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in vast amounts, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is an entire row of such chairs lined up against a wall. The style 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 of forms—that is to say, as developed in Paris around 1750—disseminated over most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The style owes its popularity to a combination of relaxation and elegance. 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 small upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions are made between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are stable, constructed on craftsmanlike methods despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those are constructed from wood of quite thick density; but all the members are deeply molded, all extra wood has been removed, and finer chairs would be further embellished with very delicate and decorative engravings. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is occasionally used rather than upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more varied in style than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and found favour 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
During 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, indicate that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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