Out of all furniture items, the chair could be the imperative one. While most of the other items (save the bed) are devised to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair is meant to be used here in the widest sense, from stool to throne to complex chairs for example the bench or sofa, which may be viewed as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not obviously definitive.
The social history of the chair is as intriguing as its history as a creative art. The chair is not only a physical support and an aesthetic craft; it is historically a symbol of social place. At the old royal courts there were plain connotations between having a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but without arms, and having to cope with a stool. Since the recent century, a director’s and manager’s chair has risen an indicator of superior position, and even in democratic government debate the speaker sits on an elevated floor.
In its furniture form, the chair is employed for a wealth of various purposes. There are chairs created to suit man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). During historical days there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs to die in (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.
Modern living has demanded particular chairs for automobiles and aircraft. All these chair types have evolved to fit to growing human needs. For its unique relationship with man, the chair comes to its full meaning only when utilised. Although it is not relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers whether there is anything inside or not, a chair is seen best and fairly judged by a person sitting on it, because chair and sitter need each other. Thus the various parts of a chair have been named according to the elements of a human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the elementary work of the chair is to support our human body, its credit is judged firstly on how fully it measures up to this practical job. Within the design of a chair, the builder is limited for certain static laws and principal measurements. Within these boundaries, however, the chair builder has awesome freedom.
The history of the chair lasted over dates of several thousand years. There existed peoples that made distinctive chair forms, expressions of the leading craft in the industries of technique and art. Out of such peoples, individual note can 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 skilled make, are now known from tombs. One of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair had four legs designed not unlike those of a designated animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. In this way a durable triangular form was obtained. There was from our view no noteworthy change in the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical non-royals. The simple difference exists in the type of ornamentation, in the particulars of more expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool probably was manufactured as an easily carried seat for army. As a camp stool that stool existed during much later points in time. But the stool also existed in the character of a ceremonial seat, its technical history as a folding stool being forgotten. This can from today 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 were in the form of folding stools but are not able to be folded as the seats are worked of wood. The plain make of the folding stool, being of two frames that spin on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric set between them, is seen but somewhat later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better known of this type is the folding stool, of ashwood, seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not with any ancient item still extant but as seen from a wealth of pictorial evidence. The most recognisable is the klismos drawn on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place by Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of which were shown. These unusual legs were most likely to be created out of bent wood and were as such needed to bear extreme pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore super strong and were visibly denoted.
The Romans embued the Greek designs; designs of statues of seated Romans display designs of a denser and apparently rather less intricately crafted klismos. Both kinds, light and heavy, were popularised in the Classicist time. The klismos chair can be evidenced in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in special brands of considerable originality around Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China isn’t able to be followed as far as the history of the chair in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full folio of images and works of art had been kept safe, detailing the insides and exteriors of Chinese homes and the furniture. Also kept from the 16th century are a collection of chairs made from wood or lacquered wood, that show an intriguing familiarity to representations of ancient chairs.
As in Egypt, two chair forms persisted in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair has been designed both with or without arms but never without a square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to support the back. In one style, however, the stiles were slightly curved over the arms to fit the form of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of a chairback). Each of the three areas are mortised into the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the idea of the Chinese back splat then had a foundation for English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden items that would only to a limited extent embolden corner joints (and are loose to top that off) signify an element signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which stops upon the rounded staves. Every member is round in section or have rounded edges—acknowledging maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and had on occasion a plaited bottom. These chairs required of the sitter to stay stiff and upright; for when too much pressure is exerted on the back, the chair has a habit of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese households of this period armchairs likely were kept for elderly persons in the family, for they were given great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have travelled to China from the West. It is akin so very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a difference in that the top rail is elegantly held to the two legs of the stool in a curved member, which is generally seen with metal mounts. From a Western perspective the ultimate effect of these furniture items is stylized. The manufacture and decorative elements are combined in a manner that is both naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is an upshot of the manner that the individual members do not look to have been held together with either glue or screws, but had been mortised onto one another and fixed in place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also put its name on the chair. Works of art display a type of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between the layers, stitched to bring up a pattern of small pads. The front board and a corresponding board in the back could be folded after loosening some tiny iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a portable piece of furniture when traveling which, during the same era, granted the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair is evidenced in engravings of the interior of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this style of chair may also be seen in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not held that the style actually started in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slim shape; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in considerable quantities, as can be surmised from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a row of this kind of chairs lined up by a wall. The design asserts itself with its shapely proportions and expensive upholstery in gilt leather or fabric framed with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature form—that was, to say, as developed in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and was imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The design owes such popularity to a combination of comfort and charm. The seat suits to the human body and permits a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Typically the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are strongly constructed on craftsmanlike principles despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them employ wood of rather thick measurements; but every member is deeply molded, all extra wood has been cut away, and more expensive items may be further embellished with special delicate and decorative carving. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry might be used for all the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is in some cases used rather than upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more open in form than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and was popularised in large 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 popular 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 office storage in Melbourne contact Fast Office Furniture today and check our specials.
Tangalooma Island Resort is an earthly haven that can be found in Tangalooma, Queensland in Australia. It was formerly a whaling station and was made into an island getaway because of its distinctive flora and fauna and its breathtaking views. Couples or families hunting down a super vacation destination can expect to certainly enjoy 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 distinctive Polynesian culture.