Of all furniture pieces, the chair could be the imperative one. While most of the other items (save the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair must be looked upon here in the largest sense, from stool to throne to further forms like a bench or sofa, which should be looked upon as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not obviously distinuishable.
The social history of the chair is as curious as its history as art and craft. The chair is not simply a physical support or an aesthetic object; it is also a signifier of social status. In the Medieval royal courts there were significant differences between possessing a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but without arms, and having to squat on a stool. In the recent century, a director’s and manager’s chair has risen an identifier of superior position, and in democratic governments the speaker sits on a high-set platform.
In a furniture construction, the chair can be utilised for a number of different forms. There are chairs designed to suit man’s age and physical form (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since historical times there were chairs used for birthing (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs to die in (the electric chair). We make chairs with one, two, three, and four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. There are chairs that can be folded for easy storage, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern day living has designated new chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. All of these chair kinds has been evolved to fit to differing human uses. Because of its particular relationship with man, the chair lives to its full advantage only when used. While it doesn’t make any difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers whether there might be anything inside or not, a chair is understood and regarded best with a person utilising it, because chair and sitter require the other. Thus the several limbs of the chair were named according to the areas of the human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the clear purpose of the chair is to support our body, its worth is evaluated basically for how suitably it does fulfill this practical use. Within the design of a chair, the maker is restricted within certain static law and principal measurements. Within these regulations, however, the chair maker has great freedom.
The history of the chair lasts over an epoch of several thousand years. There is evidence of civilizations that have created distinctive chair types, as expressive of the leading object in the spheres of technique and aesthetics. In these cultures, particular note 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 reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the result of masterful design, are today known from tombs. The first of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair would have had four legs shaped similar to those of some animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported from vertical stretchers. From this design a stable triangular form was made. There was from our understanding no marked difference from the construction of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary citizens. The real change existed in the brand of ornamentation, in the particulars of more costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all probability was manufactured to be an easily stored seat for army soldiers. As a camp stool this stool persevered until much later times. But the stool then was made for the character of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical function as a folding stool neglected or forgotten. This can now be noted, 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 were made in the structure of folding stools but cannot be folded because the seats were formed with wood. The simplistic make of the folding stool, being of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric set between them, was seen again somewhat later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most well known of this type is the folding stool, made of ashwood, which can now be found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is found not as any ancient item still existing but from a wealth of pictorial items. The best recognised is the klismos placed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground outside Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of those legs could be visible. These curving legs were likely to be manufactured from bent wood and were in that case needed to bear great pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints holding the legs to the frame of the seat had to be therefore super strong and were plainly signified.
The Romans emulated the Greek style; evidence of casts of seated Romans offer designs of a denser and apparently kind of less delicately built klismos. Both types, the light and heavy, were seen again as part of the Classicist era. The klismos style is known in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in some particular kinds of marked uniqueness around Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The past of the chair in China can not be followed as far as in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged serial of images and paintings was preserved, with images of the insides and exterior of Chinese houses and the furniture. Kept also from the 16th century are a trove of chairs constructed from wood or lacquered wood, that bear an intriguing similarity to images of past chairs.
Just the same as in Egypt, there were two fundamental chair designs in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. This four-legged chair has been found both with and without arms but never without its square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to support the back. In one form, it must be said, the stiles were marginally curved on top of the arms so as to sit correctly with the form of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of the chairback). The three parts were mortised into the yoke-like top rail. Though the style of the Chinese back splat exercised an inspiration for English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden sections that merely to a particular ability reinforce corner joints (as well as being loose to top that off) signify a design particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which finishes upon the rounded staves. All members are round in section or has rounded edges—references perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and occasionally had a plaited seat. These chairs needed the sitter to remain stiff and upright; when too much pressure is pushed on the back, the chair has a way of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this era armchairs most likely were kept for senior persons, for they were esteemed greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have come to China from the West. It does not differ very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a difference in that the top rail is intricately fixed to the two legs of the stool with a curved member, which is generally designed with metal mounts. From a Western understanding the resulting effect of both of these furniture forms is stylized. The constructive and aesthetic aspects are combined in a style that is at the same time naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is a result of the manner that the individual members do not look to have been put together with either glue or screws, but were mortised into one another and held in place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also had its mark on the chair. Paintings display a style of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in 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 loosening some tiny iron hooks. In this way the chair was a portable piece of furniture when traveling which, at the same time, had the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair can be evidenced in engravings of the interior of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this design of chair is also seen in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not believed that the form actually began in The Netherlands. Typically, the legs of the chair will be smooth, round in section, and of thin measurements; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in vast numbers, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is an entire row of this kind of chairs lined up against a wall. The design asserts itself by virtue of its harmonious proportions and expensive 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 forms—that was, as brought out in Paris around 1750—spread through 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 delicacy. The seat conforms to the human body and permits a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Generally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are strongly constructed on craftsmanlike methods despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those employ wood of rather thick measurements; but all members are deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been taken away, and more expensive examples would be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative carvings. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is often used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is in some cases used in place of upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more differentiated in form than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which came from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles through most of France and became the favourite 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 commonly known 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.
For a great deal on office storage in Brisbane contact Fast Office Furniture today and check our specials.
Sphere: Related Content