From all the furniture forms, the chair might be of most importance. While most of the other objects (save the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair is viewed here in the larger sense, from stool to throne to complex pieces like the bench and sofa, which should be considered as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not evidently defined.
The social history of the chair is as stimulating as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not only a physical support and an aesthetic item; it is also symbolic of social ranking. In the historical royal courts there were important signifiers between sitting on a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but no arms, or worse having to use a stool. During the last century, the director’s and/or manager’s chair has been a signifier of superior status, as well as in democratic governments the speaker sits on a raised level.
As a furniture creation, the chair can be used for a range of different forms. There are chairs structured to match man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). In historical times there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs used for ending life (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. There are chairs that can be folded, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Contemporary lifestyle has designated new chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair kinds has been adapted to match to different human requirements. From its unique connection with man, the chair appears to its full importance only when in employ. While it isn’t relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers whether there might be things inside or not, a chair is really understood and clearly evaluated with a person utilising it, for chair and sitter need each other. Thus the different limbs of a chair have been named like the limbs of a human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the obvious role of your chair is to support the human body, its credit is tested generally by how well it does measure up to this practical use. In the construction of the chair, the chair maker is limited under the static regulations and principal measurements. Through these regulations, however, the chair builder has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair lasts over a period of several thousand years. There is evidence of societies that held distinctive chair shapes, as expressive of the principal task in the spheres of technique and design. Within such civilisations, a 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 lifetimes of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the result of skilled craft, are known from discoveries made in tombs. First of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair would have four legs designed like those of some animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. From this design a solid triangular design was crafted. There was in our understanding no significant differentiation in the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical citizens. The simple difference lies in the kind of ornamentation, in the choice of more valuable inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all likelihood was designed for an easily stored seat for army. As a camp stool that kind continued during much later times. But the stool also was created for the character of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical task as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can today be noted, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, formed in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are made in the construction of folding stools but can not be folded because the seats were formed from wood. The simple make of the folding stool, made of two frames that spin on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, was seen again but somewhat later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most well known of this form is the folding stool, of ashwood, now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not with any ancient item still around but from a wealth of pictorial evidence. The better recognised is the klismos displayed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area outside Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of those legs were visible. These creative legs were most likely crafted out of bent wood and were probably had to bear extreme pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore super durable and were plainly denoted.
The Romans adopted the Greek design; quite a few casts of seated Romans offer designs of a heavier and are a slightly less delicately designed klismos. Both types, light and heavy, were brought back in the Classicist time. The klismos style is evidenced in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in particular types of profound originality around Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China is not able to be followed as long as chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full serial of images and paintings had been preserved, displaying the interior and outer parts of Chinese houses and the kinds of furniture. Kept also of the 16th century are a number of chairs crafted of wood or lacquered wood, that possess an intriguing familiarity to designs of previous chairs.
As were the designs in Egypt, there were two fundamental chair forms in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair has been found both with and without arms though never missing a square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to support the back. In one type, it has been found, the stiles had been delicately curved by the arms to conform to the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of its chairback). Together, the three limbs are mortised in the yoke-like top rail. Although the style of the back splat then had an introduction for English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden members that only just to a particular capability stabilise corner joints (and then were loose into the bargain) are a feature signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which ends upon the rounded staves. Every member is round in section or has rounded edges—acknowledging as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and might have had a plaited bottom. These chairs needed the sitter to be stiff and upright; if too much weight is forced on the back, the chair has a way of toppling. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this epoch armchairs likely were allowed only for the senior people, for they were given great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have been brought to China from the West. It does not vary very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a change in that the top rail is elegantly fixed to the two legs of the stool with a curved member, which is more often than not possessing metal mounts. From a Western point of view the overall effect of both these furniture designs is stylized. The manufacture and decoration aspects are combined in a style that is all at once both naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an outcome of the way that the individual items do not seem to have been put together with either glue or screws, but were mortised with one another and held in position in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also put its mark on the chair. Works of art project a design of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between the layers, stitched to bring up a pattern of little pads. The front board and a similar board from the back could be folded after loosening some tiny iron hooks. In this way the chair was a portable piece of furniture while traveling which, during the same time, gave the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair is displayed in engravings of the interiors of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this style of chair may also be found in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not held that the innovation actually began in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slim dimensions; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in vast quantities, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of such chairs lined up along a wall. The style asserts itself by its elegant proportions and delicate upholstery in gilt leather or fabric framed with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature of forms—that was, to say, as developed in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and was imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The chair owes such popularity to a combination of comfort and charm. The seat suits to the human body and permits a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions achieved between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are stable, constructed on craftsmanlike principles in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those employ wood of rather thick dimensions; but all members are deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been taken away, and finer items may be further embellished with special delicate and decorative engravings. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is often used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is occasionally used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more open in form than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the royal circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and became the favourite 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 commonly known 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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