Out of all furniture objects, the chair could be the paramount one. While most other objects (except the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair can be said here in the largest sense, from stool to throne to developed types like the bench or sofa, which may be viewed as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not clearly distinuishable.
The social history of the chair is as exciting as its history as a creative art. The chair is not only a physical support and an aesthetic piece; it is historically a symbol of social rank. Within the old royal courts there were significant connotations between sitting on a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but no arms, or having to make do with a stool. In the 20th century, a director’s and manager’s chair has become a signifier of superior rank, and even in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on an elevated floor.
As its furniture construction, the chair can be used for a number of different makes. There are chairs created to suit man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and for his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). During the olden days there were chairs to be born in (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs used for ending life (the electric chair). We design chairs with one, two, three, and four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can make chairs that can be folded for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our lifestyle has designated special chairs in automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair shapes have perfected to suit to changing human uses. Because of its close relationship with man, the chair exists to its full importance only when utilised. Though it isn’t relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers if there are things inside or not, a chair is understood and evaluated by a person sitting in it, for chair and sitter complement one another. Thus the individual areas of a chair were named corresponding to the limbs of the human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the first work of your chair is to support our human body, its worth is evaluated primarily for how well it does fulfill this practical purpose. Within the creation of a chair, the carpenter is restricted within certain static laws and principal measurements. In these rules, however, the chair builder has awesome freedom.
The history of the chair extends over dates of several thousand years. There are peoples that had individual chair shapes, expressive of the leading craft in the areas of handling and art. From such cultures, a mention 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 lives of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the items of careful make, are now known from findings made in tombs. First of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair would have four legs structured as akin to those of a chosen animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. From this a solid triangular construction was created. There was apparently no significant difference in the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular peasantry. The simple change was in the brand of ornamentation, in the particulars of expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool probably was designed for an easily stored seat for soldiers. As a camp stool that type persisted until much later days. But the stool also was created as the purpose of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical task as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can now be seen, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, created in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were in the structure of folding stools but aren’t able to be folded because the seats were formed out of wood. The simplistic manufacture of the folding stool, made of two frames that spin on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, then appeared somewhat later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognisable of this form is the folding stool, crafted out of ashwood, now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is known not from any ancient item still existing but as seen from a large amount of pictorial items. The significant kind is the klismos drawn on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area outside Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of those were visible. These unique legs were probably crafted out of 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 were therefore extremely strong and were clearly signified.
The Romans embued the Greek style; existing models of seated Romans offer designs of a thicker and apparently rather crudely constructed klismos. Both kinds, the light or heavy, were brought back during the Classicist era. The klismos design is evidenced in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in special types of considerable individuality of Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China isn’t able to be tracked as well as the progression of the chair in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged serial of sketches and artworks had been kept, detailing the interior and exteriors of Chinese households and the kinds of furniture. Also kept from the 16th century are some chairs constructed from wood or lacquered wood, that bear an astonishing likeness to designs of older chairs.
Just as in Egypt, there was two major chair designs in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. That chair can be seen both with and without arms although always having its square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to give support to the back. In one type, it has been seen, the stiles were lightly curved over the arms for the purpose of sit right with the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of the chairback). Together, all three parts are mortised in the yoke-like top rail. Although the idea of this back splat exercised an introduction for English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that could only to a restricted extent support corner joints (and were loose additionally) are an element exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which finishes around the rounded staves. Every member is round in section or has rounded edges—acknowledging perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and may have had a plaited bottom. These chairs needed the sitter to stay stiff and upright; for when too much pressure is exerted on the back, the chair has a way of toppling. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this era armchairs probably were allowed only for older individuals, for they were held in great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have taken to China from the West. It is akin very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a dissimilarity in that the top rail is delicately held to the two legs of the stool by use of a curved member, which is generally designed with metal mounts. From a Western perspective the ultimate effect of these two furniture items is stylized. The structure and aesthetic issues are combined in a style that is all at once both naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an upshot of the fact that the individual items do not seem to have been fixed by means of either glue or screws, but had been mortised into one another and held in its place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also left its signature on the chair. Artworks show a kind of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in the layers, stitched to produce a pattern of little pads. The front board and a corresponding board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some little iron hooks. Therefore the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture while traveling which, during the same period, granted the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair is seen in engravings of the inside 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 design of chair is also found in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not certain that the design actually started in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slim dimensions; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in considerable quantities, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of those chairs lined up against a wall. The style asserts itself by virtue of its shapely 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 of forms—that is, as progressed in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The style owes such 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. Typically the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are constructed solidly on craftsmanlike methodology despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those are constructed from wood of quite thick density; but each member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been taken away, and more expensive chairs might be further embellished with special delicate and decorative carvings. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is in some cases used in place of upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more variable in design than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles throughout most of France and was popularised 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
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 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, indicate 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 changed into an island holiday destination because of its precious flora and fauna and its wonderful views. Couples or families looking for a great holiday destination would certainly enjoy a Tangalooma Island Resort holiday.
Hawaii is home to many beautiful vacation destinations and holiday bookings 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 distinctive Polynesian culture.