Out of all furniture needs, the chair could be the most imperative. While most of the other objects (save for the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair is regarded here in the most common sense, from stool to throne to developed items for example the bench and sofa, which may be considered as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not clearly definitive.
The social history of the chair is as interesting as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not just a physical support and/or an aesthetic object; it historically was a signifier of social hierarchy. At the historical royal courts there were social signifiers between being led to a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but without arms, or having to squat on a stool. From the recent century, a director’s or manager’s chair has developed iconic of superior status, and even in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a higher floor.
In a furniture form, the chair holds a number of variations. There are chairs designed to fit man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). During the olden days there were chairs for births (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs for ending life (the electric chair). We design chairs with one, two, three, and/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.
Modern living has developed special chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair shapes have been changed to suit to differing human uses. Due to its particular relationship with man, the chair exists to its full importance only when in use. Although it does not make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau whether there might be things inside or not, a chair is understood and evaluated with a person utilising it, because chair and sitter complement the other. Thus the various elements of the chair were given labels as the parts of our human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the obvious role of a chair is to support the body, its value is tested principally for how well it measures up to this practical use. Within the construction of the chair, the designer is restricted for certain static rules and principal measurements. Inside these regulations, however, the chair designer has large freedom.
The history of the chair was dates of several thousand years. There existed civilizations that held individual chair shapes, as expressive of the leading task in the arenas of handling and aesthetics. Among these peoples, particular note must 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 objects of expert craft, are a finding from tomb findings. One of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair had four legs structured akin to those of a particular animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. In this way a stable triangular form was obtained. There seemed to be no marked change in the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular people. The main difference existed in the brand of ornamentation, in the evidence of expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was manufactured for an easily portable seat for army. As a camp stool the kind persisted til much later times. But the stool then was made as the role of a ceremonial seat, its technical job as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can from today be seen, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, executed in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were made in the construction of folding stools but are not able to be folded as the seats were created of wood. The simple construction of the folding stool, composed of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, came up but somewhat later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most well known of this form is the folding stool, made from ashwood, which is now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The iconic Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not from any ancient specimen still around but seen in a wealth of pictorial material. The better recognised is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place by Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of them are seen. These curving legs were considered to have been created in bent wood and were probably subjected to a large amount of pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore very strong and were plainly drawn.
The Romans adopted the Greek chair; a number of models of seated Romans display designs of a thicker and which appear to be a kind of more crudely crafted klismos. Both styles, the light or heavy, were revived in the Classicist period. The klismos design can be evidenced in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in particular types of considerable iconicism in Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China cannot be followed as far as the ancestry of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken serial of drawings and artworks had been protected, showing the interiors and exteriors of Chinese households and the designs of furniture. Kept also of the 16th century are a number of chairs crafted from wood or lacquered wood, that bear an astonishing familiarity to styles of ancient chairs.
Just like in Egypt, there existed two fundamental chair designs in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. This chair is found both with or without arms however never without its square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to support the back. In one style, though, the stiles could be lightly curved by the arms so as to fit the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of a back). Each of the three sections had been mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the style of the back splat exercised an introduction for English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden members that could merely to a particular ability embolden corner joints (and furthermore are loose in the result) are a feature particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which closes around the rounded staves. All members are round in section or have rounded edges—an acknowledgement as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and may have had a plaited texture. These chairs needed the sitter to stay stiff and upright; if too much pressure is placed on the back, the chair has a tendency to collapse. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this epoch armchairs likely were only for elderly individuals, for they were given great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have been brought to China from the West. It is not dissimilar much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a dissimilarity in that the top rail is prettily joined to the two legs of the stool by a curved member, which is generally provided with metal mounts. From a Western understanding the overall effect of both of these furniture forms is stylized. The construction and aesthetic issues are combined in a style that is all at once naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is an outcome of the manner that the individual members do not seem to have been put together with either glue or screws, but are mortised into one another and held in position in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also put its signature on the chair. Paintings project a style of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between, stitched to bring out a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a similar board in the back could be folded after loosening some tiny iron hooks. In this way the chair was a portable piece of furniture in traveling which, at the same era, granted the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair is seen in engravings of the interiors of rich Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this design of chair may also be made in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not decided that the style actually began in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of thin dimensions; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in impressive amounts, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which a whole row of those chairs lined up against a wall. The form asserts itself with its elegant proportions and fine 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 created in Paris around 1750—conquered most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The design owes this popularity to a combination of comfort and delicacy. The seat conforms to the human body and permits 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 over the armrests. Smooth transitions achieved between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are solidly constructed on craftsmanlike methods despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof use wood of relatively thick dimensions; but every member is deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been removed, and finer items might be further embellished with special delicate and decorative carvings. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is usually used for any 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 design than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which came from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and became the favourite 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 reknowned and was widely distributed throughout the world.
Late 18th to 20th century
During 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, purport that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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