Out of each of the furniture objects, the chair might be the paramount one. While the majority of other objects (save for the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair can be looked upon here in the larger sense, from stool to throne to further pieces such as the 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 clearly distinguished.
The social history of the chair is as exciting as its history as a creative art. The chair is not just a physical support or an aesthetic item; it can also be a signifier of social place. At the Medieval royal courts there were clear distinctions between being seated on a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but without arms, and having to use a stool. Since the recent century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has developed an indicator of superior rank, as well as in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on an elevated level.
In a furniture form, the chair is used for a wealth of different forms. There are chairs manufactured to fit man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). In historical days there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs to die in (the electric chair). There are chairs with one, two, three, or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. There are chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our contemporary lifestyle has demanded new chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair forms have evolved to fit to differing human requirements. Due to its unique association with man, the chair exists to its full advantage only when used. Whereas it doesn’t make a difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers whether there are things inside or not, a chair is seen best and regarded best by a person utilising it, because chair and sitter need the other. Thus the various limbs of a chair were named like the areas of the human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the simple function of your chair is to support the body, its credit is evaluated principally from how well it fulfills this practical role. In the design of the chair, the chair maker is bound within particular static legislation and principal measurements. Through these rules, however, the chair creator has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair extends over dates of several thousand years. There are cultures that made unique chair shapes, seen of the premier craft in the spheres of handling and design. Within such civilisations, a note needs to 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 construct of masterful make, are today found from tomb findings. One of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair would have had four legs formed not unlike those of a chosen animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. From this design a stable triangular construction was obtained. There seems to be no notable differentiation between the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular people. The simple variation lies in the complexity of ornamentation, in the particulars of pricier inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most probably was crafted to be an easily carried seat for army officers. As a camp stool the stool stayed until much later days. But the stool also then was designed as the task of a ceremonial seat, its technical task as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can from today’s evidence be found, 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 were made in the form of folding stools but can’t be folded because the seats were created out of wood. The plain construction of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that turn on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric set between them, then came up at some time later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognisable of this kind is the folding stool, crafted from ashwood, which is now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is known not as any ancient item still in form but seen in a trove of pictorial objects. The most well known is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those legs could be shown. These unusual legs were most likely created out of bent wood and were in that case had huge pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints securing the legs to the frame of the seat are therefore super durable and were visibly signified.
The Romans embued the Greek style; a number of models of seated Romans offer designs of a denser and which appear to be a slightly less delicately built klismos. Both designs, light or heavy, were brought back within the Classicist period. The klismos chair is seen in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in some particular forms of considerable uniqueness around Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The past of the chair in China can not be followed as long as the ancestry of chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged series of images and works of art has been kept, detailing the insides and exterior of Chinese houses and the designs of furniture. Preserved also since the 16th century are a number of chairs of wood or lacquered wood, that bear an intriguing likeness to styles of previous chairs.
Just the same as in Egypt, there were two iconic chair designs in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. This four-legged chair can be found both with or without arms although always having the square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to firm the back. In one form, it has been found, the stiles had been slightly curved by the arms to conform correctly to the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of a back). Together, all three sections had been mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. While the idea of this back splat later had a foundation for English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden members that could merely to a limited extent stabilise corner joints (and furthermore were loose as well) represent a design exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which ends over the rounded staves. Every member is round in section or possesses rounded edges—referable perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and may have had a plaited bottom. These chairs demanded of the sitter to stay stiff and upright; if too much weight is placed on the back, the chair has a way of toppling. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this period armchairs likely were kept only for senior people in the family, for they were respected greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have come to China from the West. It does not vary so very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a difference in that the top rail is delicately fixed to the two legs of the stool by using a curved member, which is usually possessing metal mounts. From a Western perspective the ultimate effect of these furniture styles is stylized. The construction and decoration issues are combined in a style that is at the same time naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is an outcome of the manner that the individual parts do not look to have been fixed by either glue or screws, but are mortised onto one another and locked into place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also had its signature on the chair. Works of art show 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 in the layers, stitched to bring out a pattern of small pads. The front board and a related board from the back could be folded after loosening some little iron hooks. In this way the chair was a portable piece of furniture while traveling which, at the same era, gave the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair can be seen in engravings of the interiors of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this kind of chair might also be seen in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not decided that the design actually began in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of thin shape; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is unquestionably a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in impressive quantities, as can be seen from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of these chairs lined up along a wall. The style asserts itself with its shapely proportions and delicate upholstery in gilt leather or fabric bordered with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature of forms—that was, to say, as progressed in Paris around 1750—spread through most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The model owes its popularity to a combination of leisure and delicacy. The seat adheres to the human body and grants a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Typically the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions are made between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are constructed solidly on craftsmanlike methods in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them are constructed from wood of fairly thick dimensions; but all the members are deeply molded, all extra wood has been taken away, and more upmarket examples can be further embellished with very delicate and decorative carvings. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is occasionally used instead of upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more differentiated in style than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the highest circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and found favour 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 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 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 furniture in Sydney 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. Formerly, it was a whaling station and was turned into an island vacation hotspot because of its distinctive flora and fauna and its stunning views. Couples or families hunting down a good getaway destination can expect to certainly enjoy 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.