From each of the furniture objects, the chair may be the primary one. While many other objects (except the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair must be said here in the widest sense, from stool to throne to developed pieces such as the bench and sofa, which may be seen as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not overtly definitive.
The social history of the chair is as curious as its history as a creative art. The chair is not merely a physical support and/or an aesthetic piece of art; it was also a signifier of social place. In the past royal courts there were plain signifiers between being led to a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but without arms, or worse having to squat on a stool. From the 20th century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has risen a symbol of superior position, as well as in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a high-set floor.
In its furniture creation, the chair is utilised for a variety of various models. There are chairs created to fit man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to connotate his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since the past there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs used for ending life (the electric chair). We design chairs with one, two, three, or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We make chairs that can be folded, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Contemporary lifestyle has demanded unique chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Every one of these chair shapes has been changed to suit to changing human needs. Due to its close association with man, the chair lives to its full advantage only when being used. Although it doesn’t make a difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau if there is anything inside or not, a chair is really understood and evaluated with a person sitting on it, for chair and sitter need each other. Thus the various limbs of the chair have been given names like the parts of the human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the fundamental role of the chair is to support a human body, its value is judged generally from how suitably it measures up to this practical use. In the design of the chair, the chair maker is limited in certain static law and principal measurements. Through these restrictions, however, the chair maker has large freedom.
The history of the chair is dates of several thousand years. There are civilizations that had distinctive chair shapes, as expressions of the foremost craft in the areas of skill and art. From such societies, special 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 lives of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the structures of expert make, are now seen from tomb discoveries. First of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The original Egyptian chair would have had four legs formed like those of some animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. In this way a solid triangular form was created. There seemed to be no noteworthy difference in the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common citizens. The simple variation was in the brand of ornamentation, in the particulars of more valuable inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most probably was crafted for an easily portable seat for soldiers. As a camp stool this form existed til much later points in time. But the stool then also was made as the task of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical role as a folding stool being forgotten. This can from today be seen, 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 are constructed in the form of folding stools but are not able to be folded as the seats were made from wood. The easy make of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that turn on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric set between them, was then seen some time later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better known of this kind is the folding stool, crafted out of ashwood, which is now at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not with any ancient object still around but in a wealth of pictorial material. The best recognised is the klismos seen on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location outside Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those legs were displayed. These strange legs were thought to be manufactured with bent wood and were in that case put under extreme pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat were therefore super solid and were clearly drawn.
The Romans emulated the Greek design; quite a few statues of seated Romans display designs of a thicker and apparently rather less delicately designed klismos. Both styles, light and heavy, were brought back within the Classicist era. The klismos style is known in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in some special forms of considerable originality within Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China cannot be followed as far as the ancestry of chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full series of images and works of art had been kept, detailing the inside and exteriors of Chinese houses and the kinds of furniture. Preserved also of the 16th century are some chairs of wood or lacquered wood, that bear an astonishing resemblance to pictures of previous chairs.
Just like in Egypt, there was two major chair designs in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair was found both with and without arms though never missing a square seat and straight stiles (vertical side supports) to give support to the back. In one type, it has been found, the stiles could be slightly curved by the arms to conform to the form of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of a back). The three areas are mortised in the yoke-like top rail. While the idea of this back splat had a foundation for English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that could only to a limited capability stabilise corner joints (and then were loose as a result) represent an element particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which closes around the rounded staves. Every member is round in section or has rounded edges—a left over as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and may have a plaited bottom. These chairs needed the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; for if too much pressure is pushed on the back, the chair has a way of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this epoch armchairs likely were only for senior members of the family, for they were held in great respect.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have come to China from the West. It is not dissimilar that much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a difference in that the top rail is intricately affixed to the two legs of the stool by a curved member, which is usually designed with metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the ultimate effect of these two furniture items is stylized. The structure and decorative parts are combined in a manner that is all at once naïve and refined. The pieced-together appearance is an outcome of the way that the individual items do not appear to have been put together by means of either glue or screws, but have been mortised on one another and fixed in place in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also left its name on the chair. Works of art display a style of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between, stitched to show up a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a related board at the back could be folded after loosening some little iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture while traveling which, during the same time, gave the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair can be seen in engravings of the interiors of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this style of chair might also be seen in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not certain that the design actually originated in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slim shape; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in impressive quantities, as can be seen from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of those chairs lined up by a wall. The design asserts itself by its harmonious proportions and delicate 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 styles—that was, as developed in Paris around 1750—conquered most of Europe and was imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The style owes such popularity to a combination of relaxation and elegance. The seat conforms to the human body and allows a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Usually the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions are made between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are strongly constructed on craftsmanlike methodology even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them are made from wood of quite thick dimensions; but every member is deeply molded, all extra wood has been sanded away, and more expensive items would be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative engraving. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry might be used for all the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is in some cases used instead of upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more differentiated in design than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which came from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and became the favourite 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
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 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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