Out of all furniture needs, the chair could be the most imperative. While the majority of other items (save the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair was regarded here in the most common sense, from stool to throne to derivative makes including the bench or sofa, which can be viewed as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not clearly labeled.
The social history of the chair is as stimulating as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not just a physical support and/or aesthetic piece of art; it can also be an indicator of social ranking. Within the historical royal courts there were plain differences between having a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but without arms, and having to use a stool. During the last century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has become an indicator of superior rank, as well as in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a higher platform.
As a furniture purpose, the chair can be used for a variety of variations. There are chairs structured to suit man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). From past days there were chairs for births (birth chairs); since 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. We have chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our modern lifestyle has designated special chairs in automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair shapes have been adapted to suit to changing human uses. Because of its particular association with man, the chair comes to its full purpose only when in use. Though it doesn’t make a difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers if there is anything inside or not, a chair is best seen and judged with a person using it, for chair and sitter require each other. Thus the several limbs of the chair are labeled likened to the areas of our human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the original work of the chair is to support your body, its worth is tested basically for how well it does fulfill this practical use. Within the structure of a chair, the designer is limited by some static regulation and principal measurements. Within these limits, however, the chair designer has extensive freedom.
The history of the chair extended over a period of several thousand years. There existed societies that had iconic chair forms, expressions of the premier object in the spheres of skill and creativity. Within these such cultures, special mention 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 objects of careful scheme, were seen from tomb findings. The first one of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair would have had four legs crafted akin to those of a particular animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. In this way a durable triangular design was made. There was in our view no marked differentiation between the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary peasantry. The general variation existed in the intricacy of ornamentation, in the particulars of more valuable inlays. The Egyptian folding stool probably was crafted for an easily stored seat for soldiers. As a camp stool the stool persisted until much later periods. But the stool then also was made as the task of a ceremonial seat, its technical history as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can today be noted, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, formed in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were constructed in the construction of folding stools but can’t be folded because the seats were worked from wood. The simplistic construction of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, reappears but some time later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognisable of this kind is the folding stool, from ashwood, now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not as any ancient specimen still in form but as seen in a wealth of pictorial material. The significant kind is the klismos placed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those legs are visible. These odd legs were considered to be manufactured from bent wood and were in that case needed to bear great pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints attaching the legs to the frame of the seat are therefore super durable and were overtly indicated.
The Romans embued the Greek chair; designs of casts of seated Romans offer chairs of a thicker and in appearance rather crudely constructed klismos. Both features, light and heavy, were seen again as part of the Classicist time. The klismos design is found in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in some particular types of profound iconicism within Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The past of the chair in China is not able to be charted as long as the ancestry of chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged folio of images and paintings has been preserved, displaying the insides and exteriors of Chinese households and the furniture. Also kept since the 16th century are some chairs made of wood or lacquered wood, that show an astonishing resemblance to representations of previous chairs.
As in Egypt, two chair forms dominated in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. That chair can be designed both with and without arms although never without its square seat and straight stiles (upright side supports) to support the back. In one image, however, the stiles had been lightly curved on top of the arms for the purpose of sit right with the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of the chairback). Together, the three areas are mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Though the design of the back splat had a foundation for English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden members that could merely to a limited capability embolden corner joints (and are loose as a result) are an element signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which finishes about the rounded staves. All members are round in section or possesses rounded edges—referable as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and occasionally had a plaited form. These chairs needed the sitter to remain stiff and upright; when too much pressure is placed on the back, the chair has a way of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this epoch armchairs probably were kept for the senior individuals, for they were held in great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have travelled to China from the West. It is akin so very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a difference in that the top rail is delicately fixed to the two legs of the stool by use of a curved member, which is usually provided with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the resulting effect of these furniture forms is stylized. The constructive and decoration elements are combined in a manner that is all at once both naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is an outcome of the way that the individual items do not seem to have been affixed by either glue or screws, but had been mortised on one another and fixed in place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also left its name on the chair. Artworks display a style of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between, stitched to produce a pattern of little pads. The front board and a similar board in the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. In this way the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture in traveling which, at the same era, gave the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair is seen in engravings of the inside of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this style of chair may also be made in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not certain that the style actually was born in The Netherlands. Usually, 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 obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in large numbers, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a row of those chairs lined up against a wall. The style asserts itself by its harmonious proportions and fine upholstery in gilt leather or fabric framed 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—disseminated over most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The model owes the popularity to a combination of leisure and delicacy. The seat conforms to the human body and permits a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Typically the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are strongly constructed on craftsmanlike principles in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them are made from wood of rather thick measurements; but each member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been sanded away, and more upmarket items might 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; canework is occasionally used in place of upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more variable 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 became the preference 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 popularised 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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