Out of all furniture items, the chair may be of the most importance. While most of the other objects (except the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair must be used here in the most common sense, from stool to throne to developed pieces such as a bench or sofa, which might be seen 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 curious as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not only a physical support and/or aesthetic artwork; it is historically a symbol of social place. Within the past royal courts there were important signifiers between sitting on a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but without arms, or having to squat on a stool. Since the last century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has developed an indicator of superior status, like in democratic government debate the speaker sits on an elevated level.
As a furniture creation, the chair encompasses a range of various forms. There are chairs structured to match man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his status in society (the executive chair, the throne). During past times there were chairs to be born in (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs for ending life (the electric chair). There are 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 and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Our lifestyle has developed particular chairs for automobiles and aircraft. All these chair forms has perfected to fit to changing human uses. Due to its significant association with man, the chair appears to its full significance only when being used. Although it makes no difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau whether there are things inside or not, a chair is understood and fairly judged by a person using it, because chair and sitter need one another. Thus the individual areas of a chair are given names as the areas of the human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the principal purpose of the chair is to support the body, its worth is valued basically on how fully it measures up to this practical job. Within the design of a chair, the carpenter is limited in some static law and principal measurements. In these rules, however, the chair builder has awesome freedom.
The history of the chair lasts over an era of several thousand years. There is evidence of peoples that made individual chair shapes, expressive of the principal object in the areas of craft and design. Out of those peoples, individual 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 lives of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the result of careful scheme, were found from tomb findings. The first of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair has four legs crafted akin to those of some animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. In this design a durable triangular construction was obtained. There was apparently no particular change from the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common peasantry. The real difference existed in the level of ornamentation, in the particulars of pricey inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all likelihood was crafted as an easily stored seat for army. As a camp stool that form stayed during much later points. But the stool also played the purpose of a ceremonial seat, its original role as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can from today’s evidence be observed, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, executed in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were made in the shape of folding stools but aren’t able to be folded because the seats are created of wood. The plain structure of the folding stool, being of two frames that spin on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, came again somewhat later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better known of those is the folding stool, made of ashwood, seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not from any ancient object still around but in a wealth of pictorial evidence. The better recognised is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground near Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of them can be seen. These curving legs were likely to have been manufactured in bent wood and were as such had great pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat are therefore very durable and were clearly pointed out.
The Romans adopted the Greek chair; evidence of models of seated Romans show designs of a heavier and in appearance somewhat more crudely designed klismos. Both features, the light and heavy, were popularised in the Classicist period. The klismos chair can be seen in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in special types of profound iconicism in Denmark and Sweden circa 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China is not able to be tracked as far as the history of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken collection of sketches and paintings has been preserved, detailing the inside and outside of Chinese houses and the designs of furniture. Preserved also since the 16th century are a collection of chairs of wood or lacquered wood, that display an astonishing resemblance to designs of ancient chairs.
Just the same as in Egypt, there existed two standard chair designs in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. This chair has been found both with or without arms though always having a square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to support the back. In one form, though, the stiles had been lightly curved on top of the arms so as to conform to the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of a back). The three sections had been mortised in the yoke-like top rail. Though the innovation of this back splat then had an introduction for English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden members that just to a particular extent support corner joints (and are loose additionally) represent a design particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which closes about the rounded staves. Members are round in section or have rounded edges—a left over perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and had on occasion a plaited form. These chairs required of the sitter to stay stiff and upright; for if too much pressure is placed on the back, the chair has a tendency to topple over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this era armchairs likely were reserved only for senior people, for they were given great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have been brought to China from the West. It is akin very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a variation in that the top rail is elegantly 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 ultimate effect of both of these furniture styles is stylized. The manufacture and decoration issues are combined in a way that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The patchwork appearance is a result of the way that the individual items do not appear to have been joined together with either glue or screws, but had been mortised onto one another and fixed in position in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also had its signature on the chair. Artworks display a kind of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between the layers, stitched to bring out a pattern of little pads. The front board and a corresponding board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some little iron hooks. In this way the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture when traveling which, during the same time, gave the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair can be displayed in engravings of the inside of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this type of chair is also found in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not held that the design actually was born in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of thin shape; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in vast numbers, as can be seen from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which an entire row of this kind of chairs lined up against a wall. The design asserts itself by its elegant proportions and expensive upholstery in gilt leather or fabric edged with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature style—that was, to say, as created in Paris around 1750—spread through most of Europe and was imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The design owes such popularity to a combination of relaxation and elegance. The seat conforms to the human body and permits a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Usually 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 strongly constructed on craftsmanlike practices in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them have wood of fairly thick density; but all members are deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been removed, and more expensive examples might be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative carvings. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is usually used for all upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is in some cases used as an alternative to upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more varied in style than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the royal circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and found 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 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 furniture in Sydney contact Fast Office Furniture today and check our specials.
Event Tents, such as wedding tents are for when you want to make a splendid outdoor scene. They are generally structures installed at a location for a period of time.
Tangalooma Island Resort is an earthly haven located in Tangalooma, Queensland in Australia. Formerly, it was a whaling station and was turned into an island getaway because of its rare flora and fauna and its wonderful views. Couples or families seeking a super vacation destination would definitely treasure a Tangalooma Island Resort holiday.
Hawaii is home to many beautiful vacation destinations and holiday bookings to these tropical islands can be made by Travel Online. This iconic tourist destination is well-known for its pristine beaches, moderate climate, world-standard shopping facilities, and distinctive Polynesian culture.
Step 1: Do your research