From all the furniture forms, the chair could be the most imperative. While most other items (save the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair is intended to be looked upon here in the widest sense, from stool to throne to further chairs such as a bench and sofa, which may be viewed as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not overtly defined.
The social history of the chair is as curious as its history as art and craft. The chair is not only a physical support and an aesthetic object; it is also a symbol of social rank. Within the old royal courts there were important distinctions between sitting on a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but without arms, or having to utilise a stool. Since the recent century, a director’s and manager’s chair has been iconic of superior status, as well as in democratic government debate the speaker sits on a high-set platform.
In its furniture form, the chair encompasses a variety of different forms. There are chairs designed to fit man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and for his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). From the olden days there were chairs for births (birth chairs); from the 20th century, there have been chairs 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. We make chairs that can be folded for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our modern lifestyle has designated unique chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair types have been perfected to match to differing human needs. For its particular association with man, the chair appears to its full meaning only when used. While it is irrelevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau whether there are things inside or not, a chair is understood and judged best by a person sitting in it, because chair and sitter require each other. Thus the different areas of a chair have been given labels corresponding to the parts of the human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the first function of your chair is to support the human body, its worth is tested firstly on how fully it fulfills this practical job. In the design of the chair, the chair maker is limited within particular static regulation and principal measurements. Within these restrictions, however, the chair designer has extensive freedom.
The history of the chair was dates of several thousand years. There existed civilizations that held iconic chair shapes, expressions of the topmost work in the spheres of craft and art. Among those societies, special note 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 structures of masterful scheme, were seen from findings made in tombs. The first one of these is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair has four legs crafted like those of some animal, a curved seat, and leading to a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. In this design a stable triangular design was created. There seems to be no notable change between the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular citizens. The main change lies in the complex ornamentation, in the particulars of more valuable inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was made for an easily portable seat for army. As a camp stool the stool persisted during much later points. But the stool then also was designed as the role of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical role as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can today be observed, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, executed in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were in the structure of folding stools but can not be folded as the seats were worked from wood. The plain structure of the folding stool, composed of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric held between them, reappeared but somewhat later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better recognised of these is the folding stool, made from ashwood, seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is known not in any ancient fossil still in form but in a trove of pictorial items. The better known is the klismos displayed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial area in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of these legs would be shown. These strange legs were possibly created with bent wood and were as such needed to bear a large amount of pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat would have had to be therefore very durable and were particularly denoted.
The Romans embued the Greek style; existing casts of seated Romans show evidence of a denser and in appearance slightly crudely designed klismos. Both features, the light or the heavy, were seen again as part of the Classicist epoch. The klismos influence is known in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in particular kinds of considerable individuality in Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China can not be traced as far back as the history of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken collection of images and artworks was preserved, with images of the interior and exterior of Chinese buildings and the kinds of furniture. Kept also of the 16th century are a collection of chairs constructed from wood or lacquered wood, that bear an intriguing likeness to representations of older chairs.
As was the case in Egypt, there existed two particular chair designs in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair can be found both with or without arms however never missing its square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to hold up the back. In one style, though, the stiles were slightly curved by the arms so as to sit correctly with the form of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of the chairback). The three limbs had been mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Though the design of this back splat later had an inspiration for English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden members that merely to a limited ability support corner joints (and furthermore were loose to top it off) represent an element solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which closes upon the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or possesses rounded edges—acknowledging perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and might have had a plaited form. These chairs required of the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; if too much weight is placed on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall over. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this period armchairs most likely were kept for older persons, for they were held in great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have been brought to China from the West. It does not vary so very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a dissimilarity in that the top rail is elegantly affixed to the two legs of the stool by means of a curved member, which is more often than not seen with metal mounts. From a Western perspective the overall effect of both furniture forms is stylized. The construction and decorative parts are combined in a manner that is both naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is an upshot of the manner that the individual items do not seem to have been constructed with either glue or screws, but have been mortised with one another and fixed in its place in the manner 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 style of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in the layers, stitched to show up a pattern of little pads. The front board and a related board from the back could be folded after loosening some little iron hooks. In this way the chair was a portable piece of furniture for traveling which, in the same era, possessed the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind 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 is also made in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not held that the design actually started in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of thin dimensions; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is obviously a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in large quantities, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of such chairs lined up against a wall. The style asserts itself by its shapely proportions and fine upholstery in gilt leather or fabric edged 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—conquered most of Europe and has been imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The style owes its popularity to a combination of relaxation and elegance. The seat suits 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 tiny upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions are made between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are constructed strongly on craftsmanlike methodology even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them are made from wood of relatively thick measurements; but every member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been cut away, and finer designs might be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative engravings. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry can be used for all upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is sometimes used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more varied in design than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and won favour 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 reknowned and was widely distributed throughout the world.
Late 18th to 20th century
In 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, hint that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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