From each of the furniture forms, the chair might be paramount. While most of the other objects (apart from the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair is intended to be regarded here in the most general sense, from stool to throne to complex chairs for example the bench or sofa, which can be looked upon as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not obviously defined.
The social history of the chair is as interesting as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not only a physical support and aesthetic object; it was also an indicator of social place. In the historical royal courts there were plain distinctions between possessing a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but without arms, or having to cope with a stool. In the recent century, the director’s or manager’s chair has been an indicator of superior rank, like in democratic governments the speaker sits on an elevated level.
In a furniture purpose, the chair can be used for a variety of different forms. There are chairs designed to fit man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since the olden days there were chairs to be born in (birth chairs); from the 20th century, there have been chairs to die in (the electric chair). There are chairs with one, two, three, and four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. There are chairs that can be folded, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our lifestyle has designated particular chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair kinds has perfected to conform to evolving human needs. Due to its significant relationship with man, the chair lives to its full meaning only when used. While it is not relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau if there might be anything inside or not, a chair is really seen best and evaluated with a person sitting on it, for chair and sitter require the other. Thus the different areas of the chair have been named according to the areas of our human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the simple purpose of your chair is to support the human body, its worth is tested principally by how suitably it measures up to this practical function. Within the design of a chair, the chair maker is bound in particular static law and principal measurements. Through these boundaries, however, the chair creator has large freedom.
The history of the chair covers an era of several thousand years. There are peoples that have created distinctive chair types, as expressions of the foremost endeavour in the areas of technique and creativity. Among such civilisations, special 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 lifetimes of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the structures of skilled design, were seen from tomb findings. The first of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair had four legs designed not unlike those of a designated animal, a curved seat, leading to a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. In this design a durable triangular structure was created. There was from our understanding no particular differentiation between the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common populace. The simple change was in the decorative ornamentation, in the particulars of more valuable inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was crafted to be an easily stored seat for army. As a camp stool that kind continued til much later days. But the stool then was designed as the role of a ceremonial seat, its technical role as a folding stool fast forgotten. This can now be noted, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, formed in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were constructed in the structure of folding stools but can not be folded as the seats were made of wood. The simple manufacture of the folding stool, composed of two frames that spin on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric held between them, was then seen at some time later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better recognised of this type is the folding stool, of ashwood, which is now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is found not from any ancient specimen still existing but as seen from a wealth of pictorial items. The iconic kind is the klismos placed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground outside Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of them could be seen. These creative legs were most likely crafted of bent wood and were therefore had to bear a large amount of pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat had to be therefore super stable and were overtly drawn.
The Romans embued the Greek design; some models of seated Romans are designs of a denser and apparently somewhat crudely designed klismos. Both features, light or heavy, were seen again as part of the Classicist era. The klismos influence is evidenced in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in special brands of considerable originality around Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The past of the chair in China is not able to be followed as long as the ancestry of the chair in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full series of images and artworks has been preserved, displaying the interiors and exterior of Chinese buildings and the furniture. Also kept since the 16th century are a collection of chairs made of wood or lacquered wood, that display an interesting resemblance to designs of past chairs.
As was the case in Egypt, there were two fundamental chair forms in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair has been seen both with or without arms although never missing its square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to hold up the back. In one type, though, the stiles had been delicately curved on top of the arms in order to sit right with the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of its chairback). The three sections are mortised in the yoke-like top rail. Though the style of the Chinese back splat then had an inspiration for English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden items that would merely to a restricted ability reinforce corner joints (and furthermore were loose to top that off) are a design signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which ends over the rounded staves. Each member is round in section or is given rounded edges—a left over perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and occasionally had a plaited seat. These chairs required the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; if too much weight is forced on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall. In patriarchal Chinese households of this period armchairs presumably were reserved only for senior persons, for they were greatly respected.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have been brought to China from the West. It is akin very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a difference in that the top rail is intricately held to the two legs of the stool with a curved member, which is generally possessing metal mounts. From a Western perspective the resultant effect of these furniture styles is stylized. The manufacture and decoration elements are combined in a way that is both naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an upshot of the fact that the individual parts do not seem to have been affixed by means of either glue or screws, but have been mortised with one another and locked into position in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also put its signature on the chair. Works of art project a kind of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between, stitched to bring out a pattern of small pads. The front board and a similar board from the back could be folded after unscrewing some little iron hooks. Therefore the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture in traveling which, in the same period, held the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair is found in engravings of the interior 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 may also be found in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not believed that the style actually started in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of thin shape; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in considerable quantities, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is an entire row of this kind of chairs lined up along a wall. The form 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 style—that was, as created in Paris around 1750—disseminated through most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The chair owes such popularity to a combination of relaxation and charm. The seat conforms to the human body and grants a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions are made between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are constructed strongly on craftsmanlike practices despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof have wood of fairly thick dimensions; but all members are deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been sanded away, and more upmarket chairs can be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative engraving. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is generally used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is in some cases used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more open in form than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and won favour 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 popular 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 styles 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.
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