Out of all furniture forms, the chair might be the imperative one. While many other objects (save for the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair is said here in the common sense, from stool to throne to complex forms such as the bench or 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 overtly distinuishable.
The social history of the chair is as stimulating as its history as a creative art. The chair is not just a physical support and/or an aesthetic creation; it is also semiotic of social standing. From the historical royal courts there were important differences between having a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, and having to utilise a stool. From the 20th century, a director’s or manager’s chair has been regarded as an indicator of superior standing, and even in democratic government debate the speaker sits on an elevated platform.
As its furniture construction, the chair can be used for a number of variations. There are chairs manufactured to attend to man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and for his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). From past days there were chairs to be born in (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (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 day living has demanded unique chairs in automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair kinds has adapted to match to changing human desires. Because of its significant link with man, the chair lives to its full purpose only when being used. Though it does not make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers whether there might be items inside or not, a chair is seen best and fairly judged by a person sitting in it, because chair and sitter suit one another. Thus the various areas of a chair were labeled as the names of our human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the first work of your chair is to support your body, its value is evaluated firstly by how fully it does fulfill this practical use. In the manufacture of a chair, the carpenter is limited for particular static regulations and principal measurements. Through these regulations, however, the chair designer has large freedom.
The history of the chair covered an era of several thousand years. There are peoples that created unique chair types, seen of the topmost work in the spheres of handling and aesthetics. Out of these such civilisations, special mention can 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 result of skilled design, are today a finding from tomb discoveries. First of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair has four legs formed like those of an animal, a curved seat, leading to a sloping back supported by vertical stretchers. In this way a durable triangular form was created. There was to our understanding no noteworthy change in the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular populace. The main difference lies in the intricacy of ornamentation, in the evidence of more expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool probably was crafted to be an easily stored seat for army officers. As a camp stool that type persevered til much later periods of time. But the stool also then was created as the task of a ceremonial seat, its technical function as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can from today be found, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, formed in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were constructed in the construction of folding stools but cannot be folded as the seats are worked with wood. The simple construction of the folding stool, being of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, was then seen but some time later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better recognised of this form is the folding stool, from ashwood, which can now be seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is found not as any ancient item still extant but found in a trove of pictorial evidence. The most well known is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of those would be visible. These strange legs were possibly manufactured from bent wood and were likely to have been needed to bear great pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints joining the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore very strong and were particularly drawn.
The Romans adopted the Greek design; some models of seated Romans are chairs of a heavier and in appearance kind of more crudely constructed klismos. Both kinds, light or heavy, were popularised during the Classicist period. The klismos influence is known in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in special kinds of marked individuality in Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China isn’t able to be followed as far as the ancestry of chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged folio of drawings and artworks has been kept safe, detailing the inside and outside of Chinese houses and their furniture. Another preservation since the 16th century are a trove of chairs of wood or lacquered wood, that show an interesting familiarity to designs of past chairs.
As was the case in Egypt, there were two standard chair forms in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. This chair is seen both with and without arms but always having a square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to firm the back. In one type, however, the stiles are delicately curved above the arms so as to conform to the form of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of the back). The three areas were mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Although the idea of the back splat later had a foundation for English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden items that just to a particular limit reinforce corner joints (and are loose into the bargain) represent a design solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which ends about the rounded staves. All members are round in section or possesses rounded edges—a left over maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and may have had a plaited form. These chairs needed the sitter to remain stiff and upright; for when too much pressure is pushed on the back, the chair has a habit of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this epoch armchairs most likely were reserved only for older persons in the family, for they were held in great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have been brought to China from the West. It does not vary very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a difference in that the top rail is elegantly fixed to the two legs of the stool by use of a curved member, which is often provided with metal mounts. From a Western understanding the resulting effect of these two furniture designs is stylized. The constructive and decoration aspects are combined in a manner that is all at once both naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is a result of the fact that the individual items do not appear to have been put together by either glue or screws, but had been mortised with one another and fixed in place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also left its mark on the chair. Works of art show a type of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, possessing two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between the layers, stitched to produce a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a corresponding board at 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 period, had 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 inside of affluent 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 seen in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not determined that the design actually was born in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slim shape; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in vast quantities, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of those chairs lined up against a wall. The form asserts itself by virtue of its shapely proportions and expensive upholstery in gilt leather or fabric bordered with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature of forms—that was, to say, as progressed in Paris around 1750—conquered most of Europe and has been imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The chair owes this popularity to a combination of comfort and charm. The seat suits to the human body and permits a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Usually the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions achieved between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are solidly constructed on craftsmanlike practices despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them have wood of quite thick dimensions; but all the members are deeply molded, all extra wood has been removed, and more expensive examples can be further embellished with very delicate and decorative carvings. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is generally used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is occasionally used rather than upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more differentiated in design than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the highest circles in Paris and Versailles throughout most of France and was popular 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 commonly 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 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, purport that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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