Of all furniture forms, the chair could be the most imperative. While many other objects (save the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair is viewed here in the most general sense, from stool to throne to further chairs like a bench and sofa, which can be regarded 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 intriguing as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not just a physical support and/or an aesthetic creation; it was also semiotic of social rank. At the Medieval royal courts there were clear signifiers between being led to a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but without arms, or worse having to cope with a stool. Since the past century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has developed an indicator of superior dignity, like in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a high-set level.
As its furniture creation, the chair ranges from a range of various models. There are chairs structured to attend to man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since historical days there were chairs for births (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs used 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 have chairs that can be folded up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern day living has demanded special chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair forms have been changed to conform to growing human requirements. Due to its significant relationship with man, the chair lives to its full importance only when being utilised. While it is irrelevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers if there might be items inside or not, a chair is really seen and fairly regarded by a person utilising it, because chair and sitter require each other. Thus the various elements of the chair were labeled as the elements of the human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the first purpose of a chair is to support the human body, its value is valued basically for how suitably it fulfills this practical job. In the structure of a chair, the designer is bound for certain static laws and principal measurements. Through these restrictions, however, the chair builder has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair lasted over a period of several thousand years. There existed peoples that had made distinctive chair forms, seen of the topmost craft in the spheres of technique and creativity. From these such cultures, special note must 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 result of expert design, were known from tombs. First of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair would have had four legs formed akin to those of an animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. From this a strong triangular design was obtained. There was in our view no notable change between the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical populace. The real variation lied in the complex ornamentation, in the particulars of more costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most probably was made as an easily carried seat for army officers. As a camp stool this type stayed for much later points in time. But the stool then was designed as the role of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical history as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can already be observed, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, crafted in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were made in the construction of folding stools but aren’t able to be folded because the seats are made out of wood. The easy structure of the folding stool, composed of two frames that turn on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, is seen again but somewhat later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognised of those is the folding stool, made out of ashwood, now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not from any ancient fossil still around but found in a large amount of pictorial evidence. The most well known is the klismos placed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of which could be shown. These curved legs were considered to have been manufactured out of bent wood and were likely to have been needed to bear extreme pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints securing the legs to the frame of the seat are therefore super strong and were clearly pointed out.
The Romans embued the Greek style; existing statues of seated Romans offer designs of a heavier and are a rather less delicately built klismos. Both designs, the light or the heavy, were brought back as part of the Classicist period. The klismos chair can be evidenced in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in special forms of marked originality within Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China isn’t able to be followed as well as in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged series of images and paintings had been preserved, showing the insides and outer parts of Chinese buildings and the furniture. Also kept from the 16th century are a collection of chairs constructed of wood or lacquered wood, that display an intriguing familiarity to images of previous chairs.
Just the same as in Egypt, two fundamental chair forms existed in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair is found both with or without arms but always having the square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to support the back. In one form, it has been found, the stiles were lightly curved by the arms so as to fit the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of the back). The three parts had been mortised on the yoke-like top rail. While the innovation of this back splat exercised a foundation for English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that could merely to a restricted extent embolden corner joints (and furthermore were loose additionally) indicate a feature signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which closes over the rounded staves. Members are round in section or possesses rounded edges—acknowledging perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and may have had a plaited bottom. These chairs required the sitter to be stiff and upright; for when too much weight is exerted on the back, the chair has a habit of falling over. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this period armchairs most likely were kept only for elderly family members, for they were given great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have been brought to China from the West. It is not dissimilar 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 using a curved member, which is generally provided with metal mounts. From a Western perspective the resultant effect of these two furniture items is stylized. The constructive and decorative aspects are combined in a style that is all at once naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is a result of the fact that the individual parts do not seem to have been fixed together with either glue or screws, but had been mortised onto one another and locked into position in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also put its name on the chair. Artworks show a kind of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, possessing two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between the layers, stitched to bring out a pattern of small pads. The front board and a related board at the back could be folded after loosening some little iron hooks. Thus the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture in traveling which, in the same time, gave the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair can be found in engravings of interiors of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this design of chair may also be made in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not held that the style actually started in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slender shape; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in impressive numbers, as can be surmised from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which a whole row of those 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 styles—that is to say, as developed in Paris around 1750—conquered most of Europe and was imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The chair owes this popularity to a combination of relaxation and elegance. 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 small upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are constructed strongly on craftsmanlike principles despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof employ wood of rather thick measurements; but every member is deeply molded, all extra wood has been removed, and more upmarket examples can be further embellished with very delicate and decorative carving. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is usually used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is occasionally used in place of upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more open in style than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the highest circles in Paris and Versailles throughout most of France and was popular 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 reknowned 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 versions 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, hint that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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