Of all furniture items, the chair might be of most importance. While most of the other forms (save for the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair should be said here in the general sense, from stool to throne to developed chairs such as a bench and sofa, which should be looked upon as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not overtly distinguished.
The social history of the chair is as intriguing as its history as a creative art. The chair is not simply a physical support and aesthetic piece of art; it was also a signifier of social status. From the Medieval royal courts there were plain differences between possessing a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but without arms, or worse having to utilise a stool. From the recent century, a director’s and manager’s chair has become a symbol of superior dignity, and even in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a high-set platform.
In its furniture creation, the chair holds a variety of various makes. There are chairs designed to fit man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). During the olden days there were chairs used for birth (birth chairs); from the 20th century, there have been chairs used for ending life (the electric chair). There are 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 and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern living has developed special chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Every one of these chair forms has changed to fit to different human uses. Because of its close association with man, the chair lives to its full importance only when in employ. Though it doesn’t make a difference 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 clearly evaluated by a person using it, for chair and sitter need each other. Thus the several parts of a chair have been given names corresponding to the areas of the human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the original function of the chair is to support our body, its value is valued basically by how fully it fulfills this practical purpose. Within the design of the chair, the maker is bound with some static rules and principal measurements. Within these limits, however, the chair builder has extensive freedom.
The history of the chair lasted a period of several thousand years. There were cultures that had made unique chair types, as seen of the leading work in the spheres of technique and design. Out of such cultures, special 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 upshot of expert make, are today found from tomb discoveries. 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 not unlike those of a particular animal, a curved seat, leading to a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. From this design a strong triangular design was created. There was from our view no marked differentiation between the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical people. The simple difference lied in the decorative ornamentation, in the particulars of costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool probably was made to be an easily carried seat for soldiers. As a camp stool this kind existed during much later points in time. But the stool also was created as the use of a ceremonial seat, its original function as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can now be found, 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 structure of folding stools but cannot be folded because the seats are made of wood. The simplistic structure of the folding stool, made of two frames that spin on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, is seen some time later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most well known of this kind is the folding stool, made of ashwood, now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The iconic Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not in any ancient object still existing but as seen in a variety of pictorial items. The most well known is the klismos displayed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location near Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of them were seen. These strange legs were most likely to be executed from bent wood and were as such had to bear a large amount of pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints securing the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore super strong and were overtly drawn.
The Romans embued the Greek style; evidence of models of seated Romans are chairs of a more heavyset and which appear to be a rather less delicately crafted klismos. Both kinds, the light or the heavy, were seen again during the Classicist epoch. The klismos style is evidenced in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in special brands of notable originality in Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China isn’t able to be tracked as well as the history of chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed serial of drawings and artworks had been preserved, displaying the interior and outside of Chinese households and the furniture. Preserved also from the 16th century are a collection of chairs crafted of wood or lacquered wood, that show an astonishing similarity to designs of older chairs.
As was the case in Egypt, there existed two fundamental chair designs in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. This four-legged chair was found both with and without arms however always with a square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to hold up the back. In one image, it must be said, the stiles were delicately curved by the arms so as to fit the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of the chairback). All three sections had been mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the innovation of this back splat later had an inspiration for English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden members that only to a limited limit stabilise corner joints (as well as being loose to top that off) represent a signature signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which ends about the rounded staves. Every member is round in section or have rounded edges—referable perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and might have had a plaited seat. These chairs demanded of the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; for when too much pressure is forced on the back, the chair has a way of falling over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this epoch armchairs most likely were reserved only for the senior 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 not dissimilar that much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a change in that the top rail is delicately joined to the two legs of the stool by a curved member, which is generally possessing metal mounts. From a Western perspective the overall effect of these two furniture styles is stylized. The constructive and decoration elements are combined in a style that is all at once both naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is a result of the way that the individual parts do not look to have been put together by means of either glue or screws, but had been mortised on 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 name on the chair. Works of art show a design of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between the layers, stitched to bring out a pattern of small pads. The front board and a related board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. In this way the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture in traveling which, in the same time, granted the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair is seen in engravings of the interior of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this type of chair can also be found in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not certain that the style actually originated in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slender measurements; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in considerable numbers, as can be seen from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of these chairs lined up against a wall. The design asserts itself by 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 forms—that was, to say, as brought out in Paris around 1750—conquered most of Europe and has been imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The style owes such popularity to a combination of leisure and elegance. The seat suits to the human body and grants a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Generally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are constructed on craftsmanlike practices even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof use wood of fairly thick measurements; but each member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been sanded away, and more upmarket examples can be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative engravings. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is generally used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is in some cases used rather than upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more differentiated in style than the French. The French taste for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles over 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 popular 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.
For a great deal on office chairs in Brisbane contact Fast Office Furniture today and check our specials.
Tangalooma Island Resort is an earthly paradise that can be found in Tangalooma, Queensland in Australia. Originally, it was a whaling station and was formed into an island vacation hotspot because of its precious flora and fauna and its glorious views. Couples or families looking for a super getaway destination would undoubtedly treasure 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 unique Polynesian culture.