Out of each of the furniture objects, the chair could be primary. While many other pieces (apart from the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair must be viewed here in the widest sense, from stool to throne to developed types including 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 evidently defined.
The social history of the chair is as stimulating as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not just a physical support and/or aesthetic craft; it can also be symbolic of social standing. Within 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 worse having to make do with a stool. In the recent century, a director’s and manager’s chair has risen an indicator of superior rank, as well as in democratic governments the speaker sits on a higher platform.
In a furniture creation, the chair encompasses a range of various makes. There are chairs created to match man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). From past times there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); from the 20th century, there have been chairs used 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 can have chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our contemporary lifestyle has developed new chairs in automobiles and aircraft. All these chair shapes have perfected to suit to growing human requirements. Due to its significant importance with man, the chair comes to its full meaning only when utilised. Although it does not make a difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers whether there are items inside or not, a chair is really seen best and judged best by a person sitting in it, because chair and sitter complement each other. Thus the individual parts of a chair have been given labels like the names of our human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the elemental work of a chair is to support your body, its credit is judged firstly by how fully it does fulfill this practical function. In the manufacture of the chair, the designer is restricted in particular static legislation and principal measurements. In these rules, however, the chair maker has large freedom.
The history of the chair is an era of several thousand years. There is evidence of civilizations that held iconic chair shapes, as expressive of the premier task in the arenas of technique and design. Within those cultures, particular 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 lives of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the upshot of skilled craft, were a finding from tomb findings. First of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair would have had four legs designed similar to those of a particular animal, a curved seat, leading to a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. In this design a stable triangular construction was created. There was apparently no significant differentiation between the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical populace. The real change exists in the level of ornamentation, in the evidence of more costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most likely was designed as an easily stored seat for army. As a camp stool this form existed during much later points in time. But the stool then also was made for the role of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical function as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can from evidence be found, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, crafted in ebony with ivory inlay decoration 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 formed of wood. The easy construction of the folding stool, being of two frames that turn on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, was then seen but some time later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better known of those is the folding stool, crafted out of ashwood, now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not in any ancient specimen still around but found in a variety of pictorial items. The most well known is the klismos drawn on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground by Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of which would be visible. These curving legs were likely to have been executed from bent wood and were likely to have been needed to bear huge pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints attaching the legs to the frame of the seat would have had to be therefore extremely durable and were plainly drawn.
The Romans adopted the Greek style; some models of seated Romans show evidence of a denser and in appearance slightly more crudely built klismos. Both features, the light or the heavy, were seen again during the Classicist time. The klismos influence is found in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some forms of marked originality in Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The past of the chair in China isn’t able to be charted as long as in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed folio of drawings and paintings was preserved, with images of the interior and exteriors of Chinese buildings and the designs of furniture. Another preservation of the 16th century are some chairs constructed of wood or lacquered wood, that possess an astonishing familiarity to pictures of previous chairs.
As were the designs in Egypt, two major chair forms existed in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. That chair was constructed both with and without arms but always with a square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to give support to the back. In one style, however, the stiles are slightly curved on top of the arms for the purpose of conform correctly to the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of the back). Each of the three sections are mortised in the yoke-like top rail. Although the design of the Chinese back splat exercised an introduction for English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that only just to a limited extent stabilise corner joints (and furthermore were loose into the bargain) indicate an element solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which stops around the rounded staves. All members are round in section or is given rounded edges—referable perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and occasionally had a plaited form. These chairs demanded of the sitter to remain stiff and upright; when too much pressure is pushed on the back, the chair has a tendency to topple. In patriarchal Chinese households of this period armchairs most likely were reserved for the senior members of the family, for they were greatly esteemed.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have been brought to China from the West. It does not differ very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a dissimilarity in that the top rail is intricately fixed to the two legs of the stool by means of a curved member, which is often seen with metal mounts. From a Western perspective the overall effect of both furniture items is stylized. The manufacture and decorative aspects are combined in a way that is both naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is a result of the way that the individual members do not seem to have been fixed by either glue or screws, but have been mortised on 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 name on the chair. Works of art display a style of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between, stitched to produce a pattern of small pads. The front board and a related board in the back could be folded after unscrewing some little iron hooks. In this way the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture when traveling which, during the same era, gave the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair is evidenced in engravings of interiors of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this kind of chair might also be found in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not determined that the style actually began in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slender dimensions; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in vast amounts, as can be seen from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is an entire row of such chairs lined up along a wall. The style asserts itself by its shapely 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 of forms—that was, as created in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and was imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The model owes the popularity to a combination of relaxation and delicacy. The seat conforms to the human body and permits a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are stable, constructed on craftsmanlike principles despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof employ wood of relatively thick density; but all members are deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been taken away, and more upmarket items might be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative carving. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry can be used for all the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is occasionally used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more varied in design than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and became the favourite 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 popularised 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 brands 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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