From each of the furniture items, the chair could be the most imperative. While the majority of other objects (save the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair is meant to be used here in the largest sense, from stool to throne to derivative forms including the bench or 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 evidently labeled.
The social history of the chair is as exciting as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not merely a physical support or aesthetic craft; it was historically a symbol of social rank. In the past royal courts there were plain signifiers between sitting on a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but without arms, or having to cope with a stool. Since the last century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has been regarded as iconic of superior status, like in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on a higher level.
As its furniture construction, the chair holds a variety of different models. There are chairs structured to attend to man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). From the olden days there were chairs to be born in (birth chairs); from the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (the electric chair). We make chairs with one, two, three, and four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can have chairs that can be folded for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our modern lifestyle has developed new chairs in automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair shapes have been evolved to match to evolving human needs. From its unique connection with man, the chair appears to its full importance only when in use. Whereas it makes no difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau if there are things inside or not, a chair is really understood and fairly regarded by a person sitting on it, for chair and sitter suit each other. Thus the several elements of a chair have been labeled corresponding to the parts of our human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the first job of your chair is to support a body, its worth is tested primarily by how fully it does measure up to this practical role. Within the design of a chair, the chair maker is restricted in some static regulations and principal measurements. Within these regulations, however, the chair designer has awesome freedom.
The history of the chair lasted an era of several thousand years. There are peoples that created individual chair shapes, seen of the highest craft in the spheres of skill and design. Within these cultures, a note 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 ascendancy of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the result of expert make, were found from discoveries made in tombs. The first of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair had four legs structured 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 obtained. There was from our knowledge no notable variation in the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common populace. The simple difference lies in the decorative ornamentation, in the particulars of more expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most probably was created to be an easily carried seat for army. As a camp stool that chair stayed around til much later times. But the stool also then existed in the purpose of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical task as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can from today be noted, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, crafted in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are made in the shape of folding stools but are not able to be folded as the seats are made from wood. The easy manufacture of the folding stool, being of two frames that spin on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, came again some time later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better known of this type is the folding stool, crafted from ashwood, found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is known not from any ancient fossil still around but as seen in a wealth of pictorial material. The archetype is the klismos displayed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground outside Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of which could be seen. These unique legs were understood to be created out of bent wood and were therefore bore huge pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat are therefore super durable and were particularly signified.
The Romans embued the Greek chair; a number of models of seated Romans offer designs of a more heavyset and in appearance kind of more crudely constructed klismos. Both features, the light and heavy, were revived in the Classicist era. The klismos design can be evidenced in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in special forms of notable originality of Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China is not able to be traced as long as chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken serial of sketches and artworks has been protected, detailing the interiors and exteriors of Chinese buildings and the furniture. Preserved also since the 16th century are a number of chairs made from wood or lacquered wood, that possess an interesting likeness to representations of older chairs.
Just as in Egypt, two chair forms persisted in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair is constructed both with or without arms but never missing a square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to hold up the back. In one image, however, the stiles were marginally curved above the arms in order to conform to the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of the chairback). Each of the three sections are mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Although the idea of this back splat later had an influence on English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that could only to a particular limit support corner joints (and are loose into the bargain) are a signature signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which closes about the rounded staves. Every member is round in section or has rounded edges—references perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and may have had a plaited form. These chairs demanded of the sitter to remain stiff and upright; if too much weight is placed on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall over. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this era armchairs likely were only for older persons in the family, for they were held in great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have travelled to China from the West. It is not dissimilar so very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a variation in that the top rail is delicately affixed to the two legs of the stool with a curved member, which is generally possessing metal mounts. From a Western perspective the ultimate effect of these two furniture items is stylized. The construction and decoration aspects are combined in a style that is all at once naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is a result of the way that the individual members do not seem to have been joined together by use of either glue or screws, but were mortised into one another and held in its place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also had its name on the chair. Paintings display a design of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between the layers, stitched to show up a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a related board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. Therefore the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture when traveling which, in the same era, possessed the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair is evidenced in engravings of the interiors of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this kind of chair is also seen in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not decided that the innovation actually originated in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slim measurements; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in considerable amounts, as can be surmised from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of those chairs lined up along a wall. The style asserts itself by its harmonious 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 form—that is, as progressed in Paris around 1750—conquered most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The design owes such popularity to a combination of comfort and delicacy. The seat suits to the human body and grants a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Generally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are constructed solidly on craftsmanlike practices even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those are made from wood of fairly thick measurements; but every member is deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been taken away, and more expensive chairs can be further embellished with very delicate and decorative carvings. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry should be used for all the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is occasionally used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more differentiated in style than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which came from the royal circles in Paris and Versailles throughout most of France and was popular 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
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 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, suggest that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
For a great deal on office chairs in Sydney contact Fast Office Furniture today and check our specials.
Tangalooma Island Resort is an earthly paradise located in Tangalooma, Queensland in Australia. It was formerly a whaling station and was made into an island getaway because of its precious flora and fauna and its wonderful views. Couples or families trying to find a choice holiday destination would undoubtedly cherish a Tangalooma Island Resort holiday.
Hawaii is home to many beautiful vacation destinations and holiday reservations to these tropical islands can be made by Travel Online. This iconic tourist destination is well-known for its pristine beaches, moderate climate, world-standard shopping facilities, and unique Polynesian culture.