Of all furniture pieces, the chair might be the paramount one. While many other forms (except the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair must be regarded here in the widest sense, from stool to throne to derivative pieces like a bench and sofa, which should be seen 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 just a physical support and aesthetic craft; it historically was symbolic of social hierarchy. At the old royal courts there were plain signifiers between being led to a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, and having to sit on a stool. In the 20th century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has risen a signifier of superior dignity, as well as in democratic government debate the speaker sits on an elevated floor.
As a furniture purpose, the chair holds a number of different makes. There are chairs created to match man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). In the past there were chairs used for birth (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs used for ending life (the electric chair). We make chairs with one, two, three, and/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.
Modern living has designated unique chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair forms has adapted to match to differing human needs. For its particular importance with man, the chair lives to its full purpose only when being used. Though it is irrelevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers whether there might be anything inside or not, a chair is really seen and fairly tested by a person sitting on it, because chair and sitter complement each other. Thus the different limbs of a chair have been labeled likened to the limbs of the human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the obvious function of your chair is to support the body, its value is valued principally from how well it measures up to this practical role. In the structure of a chair, the builder is restricted for certain static laws and principal measurements. Within these limits, however, the chair maker has extensive freedom.
The history of the chair lasts over an era of several thousand years. There are societies that made significant chair forms, expressive of the highest task in the arenas of technique and aesthetics. Among such civilisations, a mention 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 lives of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the result of careful craft, were a finding from tomb discoveries. The first one of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair would have four legs formed as akin to those of an animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. In this way a stable triangular design was obtained. There was from our understanding no notable difference from the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical people. The main variation exists in the decorative ornamentation, in the choice of more valuable inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most probably was developed for an easily portable seat for officers. As a camp stool that kind existed til much later points. But the stool then was made for the role of a ceremonial seat, its original role as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can now 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 in the construction of folding stools but can not be folded as the seats are made out of wood. The simple structure of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that turn on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric held between them, appeared again some time later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better known of those is the folding stool, crafted from ashwood, which is now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not in any ancient fossil still around but in a variety of pictorial evidence. The better recognised is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of which would be visible. These curving legs were presumably manufactured in bent wood and were as such had to bear extreme pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints attaching the legs to the frame of the seat are therefore extremely strong and were visibly signified.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek style; existing statues of seated Romans display chairs of a denser and which appear to be a kind of crudely crafted klismos. Both types, the light and the heavy, were popularised within the Classicist era. The klismos influence can be evidenced in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some particular forms of considerable iconicism in Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China cannot be charted as far back as the progression of the chair in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken serial of sketches and paintings has been kept safe, detailing the inside and exteriors of Chinese homes and their furniture. Kept also since the 16th century are a number of chairs of wood or lacquered wood, that display an interesting similarity to designs of past chairs.
As was the case in Egypt, there were two fundamental chair designs in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. That chair is found both with or without arms but always having the square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to firm the back. In one form, it has been found, the stiles had been slightly curved on top of the arms for the purpose of conform to the form of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of a chairback). The three areas were mortised in the yoke-like top rail. While the design of the back splat then had a foundation for English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden items that would only to a particular ability reinforce corner joints (and then are loose in the result) signify an element signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which ends over the rounded staves. All members are round in section or possesses rounded edges—an acknowledgement maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and might have had a plaited form. These chairs required the sitter to remain stiff and upright; if too much pressure is placed on the back, the chair has a habit of toppling over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this period armchairs presumably were only for older persons, for they were given great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have taken to China from the West. It is not dissimilar so very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a dissimilarity in that the top rail is intricately affixed to the two legs of the stool in a curved member, which is more often than not seen with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the resulting effect of these two furniture items is stylized. The structure and decoration aspects are combined in a way that is both naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is an outcome of the manner that the individual members do not look to have been joined together by use of either glue or screws, but had been mortised into one another and fixed in place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also had its mark on the chair. Works of art display a type of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in the layers, stitched to produce a pattern of small pads. The front board and a related board at the back could be folded after loosening some little iron hooks. In this way the chair was a portable piece of furniture when traveling which, during the same era, granted the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair can be found in engravings of interiors of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as 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 critical acclaim, it is not held that the form actually started in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slender shape; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in considerable numbers, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a row of those chairs lined up by a wall. The style asserts itself by virtue of its elegant proportions and delicate upholstery in gilt leather or fabric bordered with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature style—that is to say, as progressed in Paris around 1750—spread through most of Europe and was imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The design owes such popularity to a combination of relaxation and elegance. The seat adheres to the human body and allows 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 are found between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are stable, constructed on craftsmanlike methods despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof use wood of quite thick dimensions; but all the members are deeply molded, all extra wood has been cut away, and more expensive designs would be further embellished with special delicate and decorative carvings. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is often used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is in some cases used instead of upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more open in design than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and was popular in several 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 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, hint that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
For a great deal on office storage in Brisbane contact Fast Office Furniture today and check our specials.
Tangalooma Island Resort is a paradise that can be found in Tangalooma, Queensland in Australia. Originally, it was a whaling station and was formed into an island vacation hotspot because of its precious flora and fauna and its wonderful views. Couples or families seeking a good getaway destination can expect to undoubtedly enjoy a Tangalooma Island Resort holiday.
Hawaii is home to many beautiful vacation destinations and holiday reservations to these tropical islands can be made by Travel Online. This iconic tourist destination is famous for its pristine beaches, moderate climate, world-standard shopping facilities, and unique Polynesian culture.