Of all furniture objects, the chair might be the most important. While many other items (save for the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair is meant to be used here in the most general sense, from stool to throne to developed items for example a bench or sofa, which might be regarded 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 exciting as its history as art and craft. The chair is not simply a physical support or aesthetic creation; it is also semiotic of social placement. In the Medieval royal courts there were significant connotations between being seated on a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but without arms, and having to squat on a stool. Since the recent century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has risen a symbol of superior status, and even in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on an elevated level.
In its furniture creation, the chair ranges from a wealth of various forms. There are chairs created to suit man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). In historical times there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs for ending life (the electric chair). We make 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.
Modern day living has demanded particular chairs in automobiles and aircraft. All these chair forms has adapted to fit to different human uses. Because of its close relationship with man, the chair exists to its full significance only when being utilised. While it is not relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers whether there might be things inside or not, a chair is understood and judged with a person using it, because chair and sitter complement the other. Thus the individual elements of the chair are given names according to the areas of our human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the original job of your chair is to support your body, its worth is evaluated primarily from how suitably it measures up to this practical use. Within the manufacture of the chair, the chair maker is limited in some static laws and principal measurements. Through these rules, however, the chair creator has extensive freedom.
The history of the chair lasts over a period of several thousand years. There were societies that created distinctive chair shapes, as expressions of the leading task in the areas of skill and creativity. Out of these such peoples, individual mention should 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 expert craft, are seen from tomb findings. The first one of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair would have had four legs shaped as akin to those of an animal, a curved seat, leading to a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. From this design a solid triangular structure was created. There was in our understanding no notable difference between the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular people. The general difference lied in the kind of ornamentation, in the selection of more valuable inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most probably was created to be an easily packed seat for army officers. As a camp stool the form stayed around during much later points in time. But the stool then also took on the role of a ceremonial seat, its original task as a folding stool fast forgotten. This can from today be seen, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, created in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are constructed in the shape of folding stools but can’t be folded as the seats were made from wood. The plain construction of the folding stool, made of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric held between them, is seen again somewhat later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most well known of this kind is the folding stool, crafted from ashwood, seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The iconic Greek chair, the klismos, is found not from any ancient object still existing but found in a large amount of pictorial items. The iconic kind is the klismos displayed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location by Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of them could be shown. These curved legs were most likely crafted out of bent wood and were therefore needed to bear a large amount of pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat are therefore very solid and were visibly pointed out.
The Romans embued the Greek design; a number of models of seated Romans are examples of a thicker and which appear to be a rather less intricately designed klismos. Both styles, the light and the heavy, were brought back as part of the Classicist epoch. The klismos design is known in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some special types of notable individuality of Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China isn’t able to be traced as well as the history of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full serial of sketches and works of art was kept, displaying the interiors and exteriors of Chinese households and the furniture. Another preservation from the 16th century are a number of chairs crafted from wood or lacquered wood, that hold an astonishing similarity to representations of previous chairs.
As in Egypt, there were two iconic chair forms in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair has been found both with or without arms however always with the square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to support the back. In one style, though, the stiles are marginally curved by the arms so as to sit correctly with the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of its chairback). The three areas were mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Though the design of the back splat exercised an influence on English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden members that only to a restricted capability embolden corner joints (and furthermore are loose to top it off) signify a design exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which stops about the rounded staves. Each member is round in section or possesses rounded edges—references as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and might have had a plaited form. These chairs required of the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; when too much weight is pushed on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall over. In patriarchal Chinese households of this epoch armchairs probably were kept for senior individuals, for they were held in great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have taken to China from the West. It is akin so very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a change in that the top rail is delicately joined to the two legs of the stool by using a curved member, which is often provided with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the overall effect of these two furniture items is stylized. The manufacture and decoration elements are combined in a manner that is all at once both naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is a result of the fact that the individual items do not seem to have been fixed together by use of either glue or screws, but were mortised with one another and fixed in place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also left its mark on the chair. Paintings show a style of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between, stitched to produce a pattern of little pads. The front board and a related board in the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. In this way the chair was a portable piece of furniture in traveling which, during the same time, possessed the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair is displayed in engravings of the interior of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this kind of chair can also be seen in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not held that the design actually began in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slim dimensions; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in considerable amounts, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of such chairs lined up against a wall. The design asserts itself by virtue of its harmonious proportions and fine 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 created in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and was imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The chair owes the 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. Typically the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions achieved between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are solidly constructed on craftsmanlike methodology even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those use wood of quite thick measurements; but each member is deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been taken away, and more expensive chairs might be further embellished with very delicate and decorative engravings. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry may be used for all the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is sometimes used rather than upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more differentiated in form than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which came from the highest circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and won 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
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 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, suggest that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
For a great deal on office furniture in Melbourne contact Fast Office Furniture today and check our specials.
Tangalooma Island Resort is a paradise found in Tangalooma, Queensland in Australia. Formerly, it was a whaling station and was changed into an island holiday destination because of its distinctive flora and fauna and its wonderful views. Couples or families trying to find a great vacation destination would undoubtedly 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 famous for its pristine beaches, moderate climate, world-standard shopping facilities, and distinctive Polynesian culture.