From each of the furniture pieces, the chair might be the primary one. While most other pieces (apart from the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair must be looked upon here in the most open sense, from stool to throne to derivative pieces such as a bench or sofa, which may be regarded 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 curious as its history as art and craft. The chair is not just a physical support and/or an aesthetic piece; it was historically symbolic of social placement. Within the past royal courts there were important connotations between being seated on a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, or having to cope with a stool. From the recent century, the director’s and/or manager’s chair has risen an identifier of superior status, as well as in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a high-set level.
As a furniture creation, the chair is utilised for a range of various purposes. There are chairs created to suit man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since historical times there were chairs for births (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs 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 make chairs that can be folded up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern living has demanded unique chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair forms have been adapted to suit to different human uses. For its close importance with man, the chair comes to its full significance only when utilised. While it is irrelevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau whether there are items inside or not, a chair is really seen best and fairly regarded with a person utilising it, for chair and sitter complement one another. Thus the various areas of the chair were named as the areas of the human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the fundamental purpose of the chair is to support a human body, its worth is valued generally by how completely it does fulfill this practical job. In the creation of the chair, the designer is restricted in some static rules and principal measurements. In these rules, however, the chair designer has awesome freedom.
The history of the chair lasts over a period of several thousand years. There existed societies that made significant chair types, expressions of the principal object in the areas of skill and aesthetics. Out of those cultures, individual 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 reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the items of masterful design, 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 had four legs formed as akin to those of an animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. From this design a solid triangular structure was made. There was from our knowledge no particular change in the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical non-royals. The real change was in the intricacy of its ornamentation, in the evidence of expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was designed as an easily stored seat for soldiers. As a camp stool the stool continued for much later times. But the stool then existed in the purpose of a ceremonial seat, its original role as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can already be observed, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, crafted in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were made in the shape of folding stools but cannot be folded because the seats were created out of wood. The simplistic construction of the folding stool, made of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, is seen but some time later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best recognised of this kind is the folding stool, crafted out of ashwood, found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not from any ancient object still in form but in a trove of pictorial objects. The most recognisable is the klismos drawn on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground outside Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of those legs would be displayed. These unique legs were considered to be crafted of bent wood and were probably bore great pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore very stable and were particularly indicated.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek chair; quite a few models of seated Romans are chairs of a heavier and are a rather crudely designed klismos. Both styles, the light and the heavy, were seen again in the Classicist epoch. The klismos style is evidenced in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in some special types of notable uniqueness within Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China isn’t able to be charted as far back as chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken serial of images and works of art was preserved, with images of the insides and outer parts of Chinese homes and the kinds of furniture. Preserved also of the 16th century are a collection of chairs crafted from wood or lacquered wood, that display an interesting similarity to styles of ancient chairs.
As in Egypt, there existed two particular chair forms in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. This chair can be designed both with or without arms however never missing its square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to firm the back. In one style, it has been seen, the stiles were slightly curved by the arms for the purpose of suit the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of its back). Each of the three parts were mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Though the idea of the back splat exercised a foundation for English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that only to a particular ability embolden corner joints (and were loose in the result) are a signature solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which finishes over the rounded staves. Members are round in section or is given rounded edges—references as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and may have had a plaited bottom. These chairs demanded of the sitter to remain stiff and upright; for when too much pressure is pushed on the back, the chair has a tendency to topple. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this period armchairs presumably were reserved for elderly members of the family, for they were greatly respected.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have travelled to China from the West. It is not dissimilar much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a difference in that the top rail is elegantly affixed to the two legs of the stool in a curved member, which is often seen with metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the ultimate effect of both furniture items is stylized. The constructive and decorative parts are combined in a way that is both naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is a result of the fact that the individual members do not appear to have been put together by either glue or screws, but had been mortised onto one another and locked into position in the manner 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 project a design of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between the layers, stitched to show up a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a corresponding board in the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. In this way the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture while traveling which, in the same era, held the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair is evidenced in engravings of the interiors of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this style of chair may also be found in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not certain that the innovation actually originated in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slender dimensions; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in large quantities, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of those chairs lined up by a wall. The style asserts itself by its shapely proportions and delicate 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—disseminated through most of Europe and was imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The chair owes this popularity to a combination of leisure and delicacy. The seat suits to the human body and grants a relaxed seated 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 achieved between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are solidly constructed on craftsmanlike principles despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them employ wood of rather thick density; but every member is deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been removed, and more upmarket examples can be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative engraving. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is often used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is in some cases used in place of upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more variable in form than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and was popularised in large 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 reknowned and was widely distributed throughout the world.
Late 18th to 20th century
In 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 products 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 storage in Brisbane contact Fast Office Furniture today and check our specials.
Tangalooma Island Resort is an earthly paradise located in Tangalooma, Queensland in Australia. It was originally a whaling station and was made into an island holiday destination because of its precious flora and fauna and its wonderful views. Couples or families hunting down a great vacation destination will definitely 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.