From all the furniture items, the chair may be paramount. While many other objects (save for the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair can be used here in the most common sense, from stool to throne to further forms such as a bench and sofa, which should be viewed 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 stimulating as its history as art and craft. The chair is not merely a physical support or aesthetic artwork; it is also an indicator of social standing. In the Medieval royal courts there were clear distinctions between having a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but no arms, or having to make do with a stool. During the past century, the director’s and/or manager’s chair has become a symbol of superior position, and in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a raised floor.
As a furniture form, the chair is employed for a range of different forms. There are chairs created to suit man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to connotate his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). In past times there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs to die in (the electric chair). We design chairs with one, two, three, or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We have chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Contemporary lifestyle has developed unique chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. All these chair shapes has changed to fit to growing human needs. Due to its significant connection with man, the chair exists to its full advantage only when in employ. While it doesn’t make a difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers if there are things inside or not, a chair is really seen best and judged with a person utilising it, for chair and sitter need the other. Thus the several areas of a chair were given names according to the limbs of the human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the clear purpose of your chair is to support our body, its value is judged primarily by how well it does measure up to this practical use. In the structure of a chair, the designer is restricted with certain static law and principal measurements. Within these boundaries, however, the chair maker has great freedom.
The history of the chair extended over an epoch of several thousand years. There is evidence of civilizations that created distinctive chair types, seen of the premier object in the arenas of technique and aesthetics. In these such peoples, 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 ascendancy of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the items of skilled make, were found from tombs. The first one of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair had four legs crafted similar to those of some animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. From this a stable triangular form was made. There was in our view no marked difference between the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary peasantry. The real variation lies in the intricacy of ornamentation, in the evidence of more expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all likelihood was crafted to be an easily stored seat for officers. As a camp stool the form persevered for much later points. But the stool also then was made for the character of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical function as a folding stool fast forgotten. This can from today be seen, 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 construction of folding stools but can not be folded because the seats were made of wood. The simple build of the folding stool, being of two frames that turn on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, reappears but somewhat later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most well known of these is the folding stool, crafted out of ashwood, now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not with any ancient item still extant but in a large amount of pictorial material. The better recognised is the klismos seen on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area near Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of these legs can be displayed. These creative legs were thought to have been executed in bent wood and were likely to have been had extreme pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore very stable and were plainly indicated.
The Romans adopted the Greek chair; existing casts of seated Romans display designs of a more heavyset and in appearance rather crudely designed klismos. Both styles, the light and the heavy, were revived within the Classicist time. The klismos style can be found in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in some kinds of considerable iconicism within Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China is not able to be traced as long as the history of chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full serial of images and works of art had been kept, displaying the insides and outside of Chinese homes and the designs of furniture. Preserved also from the 16th century are a trove of chairs of wood or lacquered wood, that hold an intriguing familiarity to representations of older chairs.
As in Egypt, there was two major chair designs in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. This chair has been seen both with and without arms although always having the square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to support the back. In one type, it must be said, the stiles were lightly curved over the arms so as to conform to the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of its back). Together, the three limbs were mortised in the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the innovation of the back splat exercised an inspiration for English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden items that merely to a limited extent embolden corner joints (and then were loose as well) are a feature particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which finishes over the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or is given rounded edges—acknowledging perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and occasionally had a plaited bottom. These chairs required of the sitter to be stiff and upright; for when too much pressure is exerted on the back, the chair has a habit of toppling over. In patriarchal Chinese households of this era armchairs probably were kept only for older people, for they were greatly respected.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have taken to China from the West. It is akin very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a change in that the top rail is prettily fixed to the two legs of the stool by using a curved member, which is often provided with metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the ultimate effect of these furniture designs is stylized. The constructive and aesthetic issues are combined in a manner that is both naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is an upshot of the way that the individual parts do not look to have been affixed with either glue or screws, but are mortised into one another and fixed in its place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also left its name on the chair. Paintings display a kind of chair with a relatively unrefined 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 similar board from the back could be folded after loosening some tiny iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a portable piece of furniture when traveling which, at the same time, granted the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair is displayed in engravings of interiors of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this style of chair may also be found in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not held that the design actually was instigated in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of thin measurements; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in impressive amounts, as can be seen from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which a whole row of such chairs lined up along a wall. The style asserts itself by its elegant proportions and expensive upholstery in gilt leather or fabric framed with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature of styles—that is to say, as brought out in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and has been imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The design owes the popularity to a combination of comfort and charm. The seat conforms to the human body and allows a relaxed sitting 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 are achieved between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are strongly constructed on craftsmanlike methods despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those use wood of fairly thick measurements; but all members are deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been sanded away, and finer examples may be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry can be used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is occasionally used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more variable in style than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and won favour in many 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 well-known 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, hint that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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