Out of each of the furniture needs, the chair could be paramount. While the majority of other forms (save for the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair is viewed here in the general sense, from stool to throne to complex items like the bench and sofa, which may be regarded as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not obviously labeled.
The social history of the chair is as stimulating as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not simply a physical support or aesthetic item; it historically is semiotic of social rank. From the historical royal courts there were important distinctions between being seated on a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, or having to make do with a stool. In the recent century, the director’s or manager’s chair has risen an identifier of superior position, like in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a high-set platform.
In its furniture form, the chair can be utilised for a variety of various makes. There are chairs created to suit man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). From historical days there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (the electric chair). We design chairs with one, two, three, and/or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can have chairs that can be folded, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our modern lifestyle has demanded unique chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Every one of these chair forms have perfected to conform to changing human needs. Due to its close link with man, the chair appears to its full significance only when utilised. Whereas it doesn’t make a difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau whether there is anything inside or not, a chair is really understood and clearly evaluated with a person using it, for chair and sitter require each other. Thus the individual limbs of a chair were labeled as the limbs of the human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the principal role of the chair is to support our body, its worth is tested basically from how fully it does measure up to this practical job. Within the construction of the chair, the designer is restricted with the static regulations and principal measurements. In these regulations, however, the chair builder has great freedom.
The history of the chair extended over an epoch of several thousand years. There are cultures that made significant chair shapes, as expressions of the premier craft in the arenas of technique and art. Within such societies, a 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 lifetimes of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the construct of careful design, are known from discoveries made in tombs. One of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair had four legs formed as akin to those of an animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. From this a durable triangular construction was created. There appeared to be no marked difference from the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical peasantry. The simple variation existed in the kind of ornamentation, in the choice of more expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all likelihood was created to be an easily portable seat for soldiers. As a camp stool the stool existed for much later times. But the stool then also was designed as the purpose of a ceremonial seat, its technical job as a folding stool neglected or forgotten. This can now be seen, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, crafted in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were made in the structure of folding stools but can not be folded as the seats are formed of wood. The simplistic make of the folding stool, being of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, can be seen but somewhat later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best known of this form is the folding stool, crafted out of ashwood, seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The archetypal Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not in any ancient item still around but as found in a large amount of pictorial items. The most well known is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground near Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of them could be visible. These curving legs were considered to have been manufactured out of bent wood and were as such needed to bear great pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints attaching the legs to the frame of the seat are therefore super stable and were plainly denoted.
The Romans adopted the Greek design; evidence of casts of seated Romans are evidence of a more heavyset and which appear to be a slightly crudely crafted klismos. Both features, the light and the heavy, were popularised during the Classicist period. The klismos influence is evidenced in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in some kinds of profound uniqueness of Denmark and Sweden during 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China can not be charted as long as the ancestry of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full folio of images and artworks has been protected, displaying the interiors and outside of Chinese homes and their furniture. Also preserved from the 16th century are a trove of chairs of wood or lacquered wood, that display an amazing similarity to images of older chairs.
Just like in Egypt, two chair designs persisted in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair was found both with and without arms although always with the square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to hold up the back. In one style, it has been seen, the stiles could be delicately curved on top of the arms in order to sit right with the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of a chairback). Together, all three areas are mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. While the style of this back splat later had an influence on English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that would merely to a restricted capability embolden corner joints (and furthermore were loose into the bargain) represent a signature signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which closes upon the rounded staves. Every member is round in section or have rounded edges—references maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and may have a plaited bottom. These chairs required the sitter to be stiff and upright; for when too much pressure is pushed on the back, the chair has a habit of falling over. In patriarchal Chinese households of this epoch armchairs likely were reserved for older people, for they were given great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have taken to China from the West. It does not vary that much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a change in that the top rail is delicately fixed to the two legs of the stool by a curved member, which is often seen with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the resultant effect of both furniture items is stylized. The construction and decorative aspects are combined in a way that is both naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is a result of the way that the individual members do not appear to have been fixed by use of either glue or screws, but were mortised onto one another and locked into place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also had its signature on the chair. Artworks show a type of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in the layers, stitched to bring out a pattern of little pads. The front board and a related board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. Thus the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture while traveling which, during the same period, held the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair is displayed in engravings of the inside 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 style of chair is also found in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not determined that the design actually started in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of thin dimensions; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in large amounts, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a row of those chairs lined up along a wall. The form asserts itself with its elegant proportions and fine 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 progressed in Paris around 1750—disseminated over most of Europe and has been imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The chair owes the popularity to a combination of relaxation and delicacy. The seat conforms to the human body and grants a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions achieved between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are constructed solidly on craftsmanlike methodology despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those use wood of fairly thick measurements; but all the members are deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been sanded away, and finer designs may be further embellished with special delicate and decorative carving. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is generally used for all the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is in some cases used rather than upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more open in style than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and was popular 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
Within 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, suggest that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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