From each of the furniture items, the chair might be of the most importance. While most other items (except the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair is viewed here in the wider sense, from stool to throne to developed pieces such as the bench and sofa, which might be looked upon 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 interesting as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not just a physical support and an aesthetic piece; it historically was a signifier of social rank. From the Medieval royal courts there were social signifiers between being seated on a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, or having to utilise a stool. In the past century, the director’s or manager’s chair has become iconic of superior position, and even in democratic governments the speaker sits on a high-set floor.
As its furniture purpose, the chair holds a wealth of various forms. There are chairs designed to suit man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). During historical days there were chairs used for birth (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs to die in (the electric chair). We have chairs with one, two, three, and four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We make chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our modern lifestyle has demanded new chairs for automobiles and aircraft. All these chair types has perfected to suit to growing human needs. Because of its close association with man, the chair appears to its full advantage only when being utilised. Though it is irrelevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau whether there might be anything inside or not, a chair is really seen and fairly tested by a person sitting on it, because chair and sitter require each other. Thus the individual limbs of the chair are labeled according to the names of a human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the original function of the chair is to support a body, its worth is valued firstly by how well it does fulfill this practical purpose. In the creation of the chair, the carpenter is limited within some static legislation and principal measurements. Inside these limitations, however, the chair builder has awesome freedom.
The history of the chair lasted dates of several thousand years. There are civilizations that created unique chair shapes, as seen of the highest work in the arenas of handling and art. Among these civilisations, individual 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 objects of careful make, are now a finding from tomb findings. One of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair has four legs shaped akin to those of an animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported by vertical stretchers. From this design a strong triangular design was made. There appeared to be no marked variation in the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary citizens. The real change exists in the intricacy of ornamentation, in the choice of pricey inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all likelihood was made as an easily stored seat for soldiers. As a camp stool that kind stayed around til much later times. But the stool then was designed for the task of a ceremonial seat, its technical function as a folding stool being forgotten. This can from evidence be observed, 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 constructed in the structure of folding stools but can’t be folded because the seats are formed of wood. The easy 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 again but somewhat later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognised of this kind is the folding stool, of ashwood, which is now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not in any ancient item still in form but in a trove of pictorial items. The best known is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area by Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of these legs were displayed. These creative legs were understood to have been crafted in bent wood and were probably needed to bear huge pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore super stable and were clearly signified.
The Romans embued the Greek design; designs of statues of seated Romans show evidence of a denser and which appear to be a rather crudely designed klismos. Both designs, the light or heavy, were popularised during the Classicist time. The klismos style is found in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in particular kinds of profound uniqueness of Denmark and Sweden during 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 time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken serial of drawings and paintings had been kept safe, detailing the interior and exteriors of Chinese households and the designs of furniture. Kept also from the 16th century are a number of chairs crafted of wood or lacquered wood, that bear an amazing similarity to images of older chairs.
As was the case in Egypt, there were two fundamental chair forms in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair can be seen both with and without arms although always having the square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to give support to the back. In one style, it has been seen, the stiles were slightly curved above the arms to fit the form of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of the back). The three sections are mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. While the idea of this back splat had a foundation for English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that could only to a limited ability embolden corner joints (and then are loose into the bargain) indicate an element exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which ends over the rounded staves. All members are round in section or is given rounded edges—acknowledging as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and might have had a plaited bottom. These chairs required of the sitter to remain stiff and upright; for if too much weight is pushed on the back, the chair has a tendency to topple. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this epoch armchairs presumably were reserved for older family members, for they were esteemed greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have come to China from the West. It is not dissimilar that much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a dissimilarity in that the top rail is intricately fixed to the two legs of the stool by a curved member, which is usually seen with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the resultant effect of both of these furniture forms is stylized. The structure and aesthetic issues are combined in a way that is both naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is an upshot of the manner that the individual parts do not seem to have been fixed together by means of either glue or screws, but were mortised with 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 put its signature on the chair. Works of art show 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 the layers, stitched to show up a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a corresponding board at the back could be folded after loosening some little iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture for traveling which, in the same period, possessed the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair can be evidenced in engravings of the inside of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this kind of chair is also found in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not held that the design actually started in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slender measurements; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is unquestionably a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in vast quantities, as can be seen from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is an entire row of these chairs lined up by a wall. The form asserts itself by its harmonious 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 style—that was, as brought out in Paris around 1750—disseminated through most of Europe and has been imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The style owes this popularity to a combination of leisure and elegance. The seat conforms to the human body and allows a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Usually the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions achieved between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are constructed on craftsmanlike principles in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them are constructed from wood of quite thick measurements; but all members are deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been cut away, and finer examples would be further embellished with very delicate and decorative engravings. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry might be used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is occasionally used rather than upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more open in style than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the royal circles in Paris and Versailles throughout most of France and became the preference 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 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 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.
For a great deal on office chairs in Melbourne contact Fast Office Furniture today and check our specials.
Tangalooma Island Resort is a paradise that can be found in Tangalooma, Queensland in Australia. Originally, it was a whaling station and was changed into an island resort because of its unique flora and fauna and its glorious views. Couples or families hunting down a good getaway destination will definitely love 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.