Out of each of the furniture needs, the chair could be the most important. While most of the other forms (apart from the bed) are intended to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair should be regarded here in the most general sense, from stool to throne to complex makes such as a bench and sofa, which might be viewed as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not evidently labeled.
The social history of the chair is as interesting as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not only a physical support and an aesthetic artwork; it was also an indicator of social placement. In the old royal courts there were plain differences between having a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but without arms, or worse having to utilise a stool. From the last century, the director’s and manager’s chair has become a symbol of superior position, as well as in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a raised floor.
In a furniture construction, the chair is employed for a range of variations. There are chairs designed to match man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). During historical times there were chairs to be born in (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. We have chairs that can be folded, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern day living has developed particular chairs in automobiles and aircraft. All these chair forms have been changed to conform to changing human requirements. For its unique relationship with man, the chair lives to its full meaning only when being used. While it isn’t relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a dresser drawers whether there might be things inside or not, a chair is seen best and fairly tested by a person sitting on it, for chair and sitter require each other. Thus the different elements of the chair were labeled corresponding to the limbs of a human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the primary function of the chair is to support the body, its credit is tested primarily on how fully it fulfills this practical role. In the build of the chair, the builder is limited within particular static law and principal measurements. Through these restrictions, however, the chair builder has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair is an epoch of several thousand years. There were peoples that held significant chair forms, expressive of the foremost task in the arenas of craft and design. From such societies, particular 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 ascendancy of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the structures of masterful scheme, were a finding from tomb findings. The first one of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair has four legs designed like those of an animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. In this design a strong triangular form was crafted. There appeared to be no significant difference between the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular people. The simple difference lies in the kind of ornamentation, in the particulars of costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most likely was created to be an easily stored seat for soldiers. As a camp stool this form continued til much later times. But the stool then was made for the character of a ceremonial seat, its original function as a folding stool neglected or forgotten. This can already be seen, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, crafted in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are made in the form of folding stools but are not able to be folded because the seats were formed out of wood. The easy construction of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that spin on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric held between them, appeared somewhat later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better recognised of this type is the folding stool, of ashwood, which is now at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The archetypal Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not as any ancient object still in form but as seen in a variety of pictorial evidence. The iconic kind is the klismos posited on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location near Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of these legs could be visible. These curving legs were understood to have been crafted from bent wood and were as such had to bear extreme pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore very strong and were particularly denoted.
The Romans embued the Greek chair; designs of statues of seated Romans offer evidence of a more heavyset and which appear to be a rather more crudely constructed klismos. Both types, the light or the heavy, were brought back in the Classicist epoch. The klismos style can be evidenced in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in special forms of profound individuality of Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The past of the chair in China cannot be traced as far back as the progression of the chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken collection of drawings and works of art was kept, displaying the interiors and outside of Chinese houses and the furniture. Another preservation from the 16th century are a trove of chairs made of wood or lacquered wood, that show an amazing likeness to styles of ancient chairs.
Just as in Egypt, there existed two iconic chair designs in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair can be found both with or without arms but always having its square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to hold up the back. In one image, however, the stiles had been slightly curved by the arms for the purpose of sit right with the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of the back). Together, all three areas were mortised onto the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the design of this back splat exercised a foundation for English chairs in the Queen Anne period, wooden members that would merely to a limited limit support corner joints (and then were loose in the result) indicate a signature exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which ends over the rounded staves. All members are round in section or possesses rounded edges—references perhaps to the bamboo tradition. The seat is uncomfortable and may have a plaited texture. These chairs required of the sitter to be stiff and upright; for if too much weight is forced on the back, the chair has a tendency to topple. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this epoch armchairs likely were allowed only for the senior members of the family, for they were given great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have travelled to China from the West. It is akin so very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a difference in that the top rail is elegantly affixed to the two legs of the stool by a curved member, which is often possessing metal mounts. From a Western point of view the resulting effect of these furniture forms is stylized. The constructive and aesthetic aspects are combined in a manner that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is an upshot of the fact that the individual members do not look to have been put together with either glue or screws, but were mortised into one another and fixed in its 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. Artworks show a type of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, with two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between the layers, stitched to show up a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a related board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. In this way the chair was an easily portable piece of furniture when traveling which, at the same period, held the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair is evidenced in engravings of the interior of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as 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 preference, it is not held that the design actually originated in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of slim measurements; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in large amounts, as can be seen from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of these chairs lined up along a wall. The style asserts itself by virtue of its shapely 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 of styles—that is to say, as brought out in Paris around 1750—disseminated through most of Europe and has been imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The chair owes such popularity to a combination of leisure and delicacy. The seat conforms to the human body and grants a relaxed sitting 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 achieved between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are constructed solidly on craftsmanlike methodology even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those use wood of relatively thick measurements; but all the members are deeply molded, all extra wood has been cut away, and more upmarket designs can be further embellished with very delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is often used for all upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is in some cases used in place of upholstery.
English chairs in the 18th century were more open in style than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the royal circles in Paris and Versailles throughout 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 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 products 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 chairs in Sydney contact Fast Office Furniture today and check our specials.
Sphere: Related Content