Of all furniture forms, the chair may be the most important. While many other items (apart from the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair was looked upon here in the common sense, from stool to throne to complex pieces for example the bench or sofa, which should be considered as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not obviously defined.
The social history of the chair is as stimulating as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not only a physical support and an aesthetic object; it historically was semiotic of social placement. At the past royal courts there were plain distinctions between having a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but without arms, and having to cope with a stool. From the last century, a director’s or manager’s chair has been seen as a symbol of superior position, as well as in democratic government debate the speaker sits on an elevated level.
As a furniture creation, the chair can be employed for a variety of different models. There are chairs structured to attend to man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to connotate his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). From the past there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); since the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (the electric chair). There are chairs with one, two, three, or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. There are chairs that can be folded for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our contemporary lifestyle has developed special chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair shapes has changed to match to growing human desires. Due to its significant association with man, the chair exists to its full advantage only when being utilised. Whereas it doesn’t make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers if there might be anything inside or not, a chair is understood and fairly evaluated with a person utilising it, for chair and sitter complement one another. Thus the different parts of a chair have been labeled according to the parts of our human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the clear function of the chair is to support the body, its value is valued generally by how fully it measures up to this practical role. Within the build of the chair, the chair maker is bound under particular static regulation and principal measurements. Through these regulations, however, the chair maker has awesome freedom.
The history of the chair extends over an era of several thousand years. There are societies that made iconic chair shapes, as expressions of the principal task in the arenas of skill and design. Within such peoples, a note 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 lifetimes of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the upshot of careful scheme, are today seen from discoveries made in tombs. The first of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair would have had four legs designed as akin to those of a designated animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. In this design a stable triangular form was obtained. There seems to be no noteworthy differentiation in the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary populace. The real difference exists in the intricacy of its ornamentation, in the particulars of more costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most probably was crafted as an easily portable seat for army officers. As a camp stool the stool stayed around during much later periods of time. But the stool then also was designed for the purpose of a ceremonial seat, its technical role as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can from today be noted, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, created in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are constructed in the construction of folding stools but can not be folded because the seats were made with wood. The simplistic construction of the folding stool, composed of two frames that spin on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric held between them, came up but somewhat later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better recognised of this kind is the folding stool, from ashwood, which can now be seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The iconic Greek chair, the klismos, is known not from any ancient object still in form but found in a variety of pictorial material. The archetype is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground by Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of these legs can be visible. These curved legs were thought to have been executed from bent wood and were probably needed to bear a large amount of pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints attaching the legs to the frame of the seat are therefore super strong and were plainly indicated.
The Romans emulated the Greek designs; a number of models of seated Romans offer examples of a denser and which appear to be a kind of less delicately designed klismos. Both features, light or heavy, were brought back as part of the Classicist time. The klismos design is seen in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in particular forms of profound individuality in Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China is not able to be charted as well as in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken series of drawings and works of art has been protected, displaying the interior and outside of Chinese houses and the designs of furniture. Also preserved from the 16th century are a trove of chairs constructed from wood or lacquered wood, that bear an interesting likeness to representations of ancient chairs.
As was the case in Egypt, there existed two fundamental chair designs in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair was seen both with and without arms however always with a square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to support the back. In one kind, it has been seen, the stiles were lightly curved over the arms for the purpose of sit correctly with the shape of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of the chairback). Together, the three limbs were mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Although the idea of this back splat had an influence on English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden members that would only to a limited capability support corner joints (and then are loose in the bargain) signify a design signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which finishes upon the rounded staves. Each member is round in section or have rounded edges—referable perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and had on occasion a plaited bottom. These chairs needed the sitter to remain stiff and upright; when too much pressure is pushed on the back, the chair has a way of toppling. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this epoch armchairs likely were only for older persons in the family, for they were held in great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have travelled to China from the West. It is akin 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 using a curved member, which is often possessing metal mounts. From a Western understanding the overall effect of these two furniture styles is stylized. The construction and decorative aspects are combined in a style that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is an outcome of the way that the individual items do not seem to have been fixed together with either glue or screws, but are mortised with one another and locked into its place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also had its name on the chair. Works of art project a design of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between the layers, stitched to bring out a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a related board from the back could be folded after loosening some tiny iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture in traveling which, at the same period, gave the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair is displayed in engravings of interiors of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this style of chair can also be seen in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not held that the style actually was instigated in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slim measurements; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in considerable amounts, as can be seen from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which a whole row of those chairs lined up against a wall. The style asserts itself by 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 of forms—that is, as brought out in Paris around 1750—disseminated through most of Europe and was imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The chair owes such popularity to a combination of comfort and elegance. The seat adheres to the human body and grants 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 on the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are constructed solidly on craftsmanlike methods in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them are made from wood of relatively thick density; but all the members are deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been sanded away, and more expensive chairs can be further embellished with special delicate and decorative engravings. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is generally used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is in some cases used instead of upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more varied in design than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and won favour 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 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 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, suggest that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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