Out of each of the furniture forms, the chair could be the paramount one. While most of the other pieces (save for the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair can be looked upon here in the most open sense, from stool to throne to further items including a bench and sofa, which can be seen as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not clearly definitive.
The social history of the chair is as curious as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not just a physical support and/or an aesthetic item; it is also an indicator of social hierarchy. From the historical royal courts there were important connotations between sitting on a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but without arms, and having to sit on a stool. During the recent century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has become an identifier of superior rank, as well as in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a high-set platform.
As a furniture purpose, the chair is employed for a variety of variations. There are chairs designed to attend to man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since historical days there were chairs for birthing (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs to die in (the electric chair). We make chairs with one, two, three, or four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can make chairs that can be folded up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Contemporary lifestyle has derived unique chairs for automobiles and aircraft. Each of these chair types have perfected to match to different human uses. Due to its particular importance with man, the chair exists to its full advantage only when being used. While it isn’t relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers if there might be items inside or not, a chair is really seen best and fairly evaluated with a person using it, for chair and sitter suit one another. Thus the several elements of the chair have been named corresponding to the parts of the human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the original role of your chair is to support the human body, its value is valued principally from how completely it fulfills this practical use. Within the build of the chair, the designer is restricted in some static legislation and principal measurements. In these limitations, however, the chair designer has great freedom.
The history of the chair was an era of several thousand years. There are peoples that made unique chair types, as expressions of the principal endeavour in the arenas of technique and art. Within such cultures, individual 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 reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the objects of expert design, were a finding from tomb discoveries. The first one of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair had four legs structured like those of a designated animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. In this design a stable triangular design was made. There was from our knowledge no marked differentiation in the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular populace. The general change was in the brand of ornamentation, in the evidence of costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was created to be an easily stored seat for soldiers. As a camp stool the form continued during much later points in time. But the stool then also was created as the role of a ceremonial seat, its technical job as a folding stool simply forgotten. This can today be noted, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, created in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were in the form of folding stools but aren’t able to be folded because the seats are worked from wood. The simplistic build of the folding stool, composed of two frames that rotate on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, reappears somewhat later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most well known of this form is the folding stool, crafted from ashwood, which is now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is known not as any ancient fossil still around but as seen from a variety of pictorial objects. The most well known is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial ground outside Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of them could be visible. These curved legs were presumed to have been manufactured of bent wood and were therefore bore great pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints attaching the legs to the frame of the seat would have had to be therefore extremely durable and were plainly indicated.
The Romans emulated the Greek chair; some casts of seated Romans show chairs of a heavier and apparently kind of less intricately constructed klismos. Both features, the light and heavy, were seen again as part of the Classicist period. The klismos chair is known in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in some forms of considerable individuality around Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China cannot be tracked as far back as the progression of the chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged folio of sketches and paintings had been kept safe, with images of the insides and outer parts of Chinese households and the kinds of furniture. Another preservation from the 16th century are a collection of chairs made of wood or lacquered wood, that possess an amazing likeness to representations of older chairs.
Just like in Egypt, two fundamental chair forms existed in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. This four-legged chair was designed both with or without arms but always having a square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to hold up the back. In one image, however, the stiles could be lightly curved above the arms for the purpose of conform correctly to the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of the chairback). All three areas are mortised on the yoke-like top rail. Though the idea of this back splat had an inspiration for English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that only to a particular extent embolden corner joints (and were loose to top it off) indicate a feature exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which finishes upon the rounded staves. Each member is round in section or has rounded edges—an acknowledgement perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and had on occasion a plaited seat. These chairs required of the sitter to remain stiff and upright; for if too much pressure is pushed on the back, the chair has a way of toppling. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this era armchairs likely were kept only for senior individuals in the family, for they were esteemed greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have come to China from the West. It is akin that much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a variation in that the top rail is prettily held to the two legs of the stool by use of a curved member, which is more often than not designed with metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the resulting effect of these two furniture styles is stylized. The constructive and decorative issues are combined in a style that is both naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is an outcome of the way that the individual items do not look to have been adjoined by use of either glue or screws, but have been mortised into one another and fixed in position in the manner of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also had its name on the chair. Works of art project a kind of chair with a relatively brusque wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between, stitched to bring up a pattern of little pads. The front board and a related board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some tiny iron hooks. Thus the chair was a portable piece of furniture when traveling which, during the same era, had the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair is displayed in engravings of the interior 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 style of chair may 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 began in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of thin measurements; they are in some cases baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is unquestionably a bourgeois piece of furniture and was produced in impressive quantities, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which a whole row of this kind of chairs lined up against a wall. The form asserts itself by virtue of its harmonious proportions and fine upholstery in gilt leather or fabric bordered with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature form—that is, as brought out in Paris around 1750—conquered most of Europe and has been imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The model owes this popularity to a combination of leisure and charm. The seat suits to the human body and permits a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions are achieved between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are solidly constructed on craftsmanlike methodology even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them employ wood of quite thick density; but every member is deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been sanded away, and more upmarket examples would be further embellished with special delicate and decorative engravings. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry might be used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is occasionally used rather than upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more variable in style than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the highest circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and won 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 well-known 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 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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Tags: office cahirs, office furnitureJune 26th, 2010UncategorizedRead More >No Comments