Out of each of the furniture pieces, the chair could be of the most importance. While most other forms (save the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair was looked upon here in the wider sense, from stool to throne to derivative chairs including a bench and sofa, which might be regarded as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not evidently distinuishable.
The social history of the chair is as intriguing as its history as art and craft. The chair is not only a physical support or an aesthetic item; it is historically symbolic of social placement. At the Medieval royal courts there were important signifiers between sitting on a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but without arms, and having to cope with a stool. During the past century, the director’s and manager’s chair has been regarded as an indicator of superior status, like in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a high-set floor.
In its furniture construction, the chair can be employed for a number of various purposes. There are chairs structured to suit man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). During the past there were chairs for births (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs used 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 can have chairs that can be folded, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our modern lifestyle has developed new chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair shapes have evolved to conform to changing human requirements. For its close relationship with man, the chair lives to its full importance only when in employ. Although it doesn’t make a difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau if there might be things inside or not, a chair is seen best and judged best by a person utilising it, because chair and sitter need each other. Thus the different areas of a chair are labeled as the parts of a human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the simple role of your chair is to support our human body, its value is judged firstly from how well it measures up to this practical function. In the build of a chair, the maker is limited by the static laws and principal measurements. Under these regulations, however, the chair designer has great freedom.
The history of the chair covered an era of several thousand years. There were peoples that held individual chair forms, expressive of the highest task in the areas of skill and design. Out of those 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 lifetimes of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the construct of careful scheme, are found from findings made in tombs. First of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair would have four legs crafted similar to those of an animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported by vertical stretchers. In this design a stable triangular design was created. There was from our view no notable differentiation from the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for typical citizens. The simple difference lies in the kind of ornamentation, in the particulars of pricey inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was developed as an easily stored seat for soldiers. As a camp stool this kind existed for much later periods of time. But the stool also was created as the role of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical job as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can already be found, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, formed in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are made in the construction of folding stools but can not be folded as the seats are formed out of wood. The simplistic manufacture of the folding stool, composed of two frames that turn on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric held between them, was then seen some time later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best known of this type is the folding stool, crafted out of ashwood, which is now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not in any ancient item still existing but from a variety of pictorial objects. The archetype is the klismos seen on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground near Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of those legs would be shown. These creative legs were considered to be created out of bent wood and were in that case put under extreme pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints securing the legs to the frame of the seat are therefore extremely durable and were visibly denoted.
The Romans embued the Greek designs; quite a few statues of seated Romans offer examples of a thicker and are a kind of crudely constructed klismos. Both types, the light or the heavy, were brought back within the Classicist era. The klismos influence is seen in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in special forms of profound uniqueness within Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China can not be traced as well as the ancestry of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unscathed folio of drawings and paintings has been protected, displaying the interiors and exterior of Chinese households and the furniture. Another preservation from the 16th century are a collection of chairs constructed of wood or lacquered wood, that show an interesting resemblance to pictures of ancient chairs.
Just like in Egypt, there were two fundamental chair designs in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair is found both with and without arms however always with the square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to give support to the back. In one type, though, the stiles could be lightly curved by the arms to fit the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of its chairback). Together, the three sections were mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. While the style of the Chinese back splat had an influence on English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden items that just to a limited ability stabilise corner joints (and furthermore were loose into the bargain) indicate an element solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which closes over the rounded staves. Members are round in section or is given rounded edges—references perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and had on occasion a plaited texture. These chairs required of the sitter to be stiff and upright; if too much pressure is forced on the back, the chair has a habit of toppling over. In patriarchal Chinese households of this epoch armchairs probably were allowed only for senior members of the family, for they were greatly esteemed.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have travelled to China from the West. It does not vary so very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a difference in that the top rail is prettily fixed to the two legs of the stool by a curved member, which is usually provided with metal mounts. From a Western perspective the ultimate effect of both these furniture styles is stylized. The structure and aesthetic parts are combined in a way that is at the same time naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an outcome of the fact that the individual members do not seem to have been joined together by use of either glue or screws, but had been mortised onto one another and fixed 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 name on the chair. Works of art show a design of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, possessing two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between, stitched to bring out a pattern of small pads. The front board and a related board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. Therefore the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture when traveling which, at the same period, granted the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair can be evidenced in engravings of the interiors of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this type of chair may also be found in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not held that the innovation actually started in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slender shape; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in large amounts, as evidenced 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 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 styles—that is to say, as developed in Paris around 1750—spread through most of Europe and has been imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The chair owes the popularity to a combination of relaxation and delicacy. The seat suits 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 small upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are strongly constructed on craftsmanlike practices even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them are made from wood of rather thick density; but each member is deeply molded, all extra wood has been removed, and finer items might be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative carving. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is used for all upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is occasionally used instead of upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more open in style than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and became the preference 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 popular 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 versions 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.
For a great deal on office storage in Melbourne contact Fast Office Furniture today and check our specials.
Sphere: Related Content