Out of each of the furniture forms, the chair might be paramount. While the majority of other items (save the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair can be regarded here in the common sense, from stool to throne to complex kinds like a bench and sofa, which can be seen as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not overtly definitive.
The social history of the chair is as interesting as its history as a creative art. The chair is not merely a physical support or an aesthetic object; it can also be a symbol of social placement. In the Medieval royal courts there were important signifiers between having a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but without arms, or worse having to squat on a stool. From the 20th century, the director’s and manager’s chair has risen iconic of superior rank, as well as in democratic governments the speaker sits on an elevated floor.
In a furniture creation, the chair is employed for a variety of various models. There are chairs manufactured to fit man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his rank 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 for ending life (the electric chair). We make 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 and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern day living has developed unique chairs in automobiles and aircraft. All these chair types have changed to fit to growing human needs. For its close relationship with man, the chair lives to its full importance only when used. Although it isn’t relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau whether there might be anything inside or not, a chair is really seen best and fairly judged with a person utilising it, because chair and sitter require one another. Thus the several limbs of the chair were given names as the elements of our human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the first work of a chair is to support your body, its value is evaluated primarily on how suitably it does measure up to this practical job. Within the structure of a chair, the chair maker is bound by certain static regulations and principal measurements. In these boundaries, however, the chair designer has great freedom.
The history of the chair was a period of several thousand years. There were civilizations that had made unique chair shapes, as seen of the leading task in the arenas of handling and aesthetics. In these such societies, a mention 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 expert craft, were seen from findings made in tombs. The first one of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair would have had four legs crafted as akin to those of a chosen animal, a curved seat, leading to a sloping back supported by vertical stretchers. In this way a stable triangular construction was made. There was apparently no marked change between the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular non-royals. The real difference lied in the level of ornamentation, in the particulars of pricier inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most likely was made for an easily portable seat for army officers. As a camp stool that type persisted for much later days. But the stool also then was designed as the use of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical history 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 made in the construction of folding stools but can’t be folded because the seats were worked of wood. The easy build of the folding stool, composed of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, reappears some time later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognisable of those is the folding stool, crafted out of ashwood, which is now at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is found not in any ancient object still extant but as seen from a wealth of pictorial items. The archetype is the klismos displayed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place by Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those legs can be seen. These unusual legs were probably manufactured with bent wood and were therefore bore great pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat had to be therefore extremely solid and were particularly denoted.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek designs; some casts of seated Romans display examples of a heavier and apparently kind of crudely constructed klismos. Both kinds, the light or the heavy, were revived within the Classicist epoch. The klismos style is known in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some special forms of profound originality around Denmark and Sweden during 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China cannot be traced as long as in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed series of images and works of art had been kept, displaying the interior and outside of Chinese houses and their furniture. Also kept since the 16th century are some chairs constructed from wood or lacquered wood, that hold an intriguing resemblance to designs of ancient chairs.
Same as in Egypt, there were two major chair forms in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair can be seen both with or without arms although always having the square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to support the back. In one design, however, the stiles were lightly curved over the arms for the purpose of conform to the form of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of its back). All three sections are mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the innovation of this back splat had an introduction for English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden items that only just to a restricted limit embolden corner joints (and furthermore were loose to top it off) represent a design exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which ends around the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or have rounded edges—acknowledging maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and may have had a plaited bottom. These chairs needed the sitter to be stiff and upright; when too much weight is exerted on the back, the chair has a habit of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this era armchairs likely were reserved for older persons, for they were greatly respected.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have come to China from the West. It does not differ so very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a difference in that the top rail is delicately held to the two legs of the stool with a curved member, which is more often than not seen with metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the resultant effect of both of these furniture designs is stylized. The structure and aesthetic aspects are combined in a style that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is an upshot of the way that the individual parts do not look to have been fixed by means of either glue or screws, but are mortised onto one another and locked into its 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 project a kind of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, possessing two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between, stitched to produce a pattern of small pads. The front board and a related board from the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. In this way the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture in traveling which, during the same era, held the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair can be evidenced in engravings of the inside of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this type of chair may also be found in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not certain that the style actually originated in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of thin dimensions; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in impressive numbers, as can be seen 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 expensive upholstery in gilt leather or fabric edged with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature style—that was, as progressed in Paris around 1750—disseminated through most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The model owes its popularity to a combination of comfort and charm. The seat adheres to the human body and permits a relaxed sitting 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 are achieved between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are constructed strongly on craftsmanlike methods even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them are constructed from wood of fairly thick dimensions; but all members are deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been cut away, and finer examples may be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative engraving. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is in some cases used in place of upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more varied in design than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the highest circles in Paris and Versailles throughout most of France and was popularised 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 well-known 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 brands 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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