From all the furniture items, the chair may be the primary one. While many other objects (save the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair was looked upon here in the largest sense, from stool to throne to developed items including the bench or sofa, which can be viewed as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not overtly distinuishable.
The social history of the chair is as curious as its history as a creative art. The chair is not simply a physical support or aesthetic item; it was also a signifier of social status. From the historical royal courts there were plain signifiers between being led to a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but no arms, or worse having to use a stool. In the last century, the director’s and/or manager’s chair has been an identifier of superior status, as well as in democratic government debate the speaker sits on an elevated floor.
As its furniture purpose, the chair ranges from a variety of various makes. There are chairs created to fit man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). During historical days there were chairs for births (birth chairs); in the 20th century, there have been chairs used to die in (the electric chair). There are chairs with one, two, three, and four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We have chairs that can be folded up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern day living has designated new chairs in automobiles and aircraft. Each and every one of these chair shapes have perfected to fit to different human requirements. From its particular connection with man, the chair exists to its full importance only when being used. While it isn’t relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers whether there might be anything inside or not, a chair is understood best and judged best by a person utilising it, for chair and sitter need one another. Thus the different limbs of a chair were labeled corresponding to the elements of our human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the primary purpose of the chair is to support our human body, its credit is judged principally for how suitably it does measure up to this practical use. In the structure of a chair, the builder is limited for particular static laws and principal measurements. In these limits, however, the chair designer has large freedom.
The history of the chair extends over a period of several thousand years. There are cultures that have created individual chair forms, seen of the principal craft in the spheres of handling and art. Within these such cultures, a 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 construct of careful make, are seen from findings made in tombs. First of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair has four legs structured as akin to those of a designated animal, a curved seat, with a sloping back supported by vertical stretchers. From this design a stable triangular construction was made. There was from our view no particular differentiation between the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common populace. The real change exists in the kind of ornamentation, in the evidence of expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool probably was made as an easily packed seat for soldiers. As a camp stool that form persisted during much later times. But the stool also took on the role of a ceremonial seat, its original role as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can from today’s evidence be found, 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 were made in the construction of folding stools but can’t be folded because the seats were worked from wood. The simple construction of the folding stool, composed of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric set between them, came up at some time later as the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better known of those is the folding stool, from ashwood, seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not as any ancient item still in form but found in a large amount of pictorial objects. The best known is the klismos displayed 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 those can be displayed. These unusual legs were probably crafted of bent wood and were therefore bore huge pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore very strong and were overtly indicated.
The Romans embued the Greek design; designs of models of seated Romans show chairs of a heavier and are a somewhat less delicately built klismos. Both styles, the light and heavy, were popularised within the Classicist period. The klismos influence can be evidenced in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in some special kinds of considerable iconicism in Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China cannot be charted as far as in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged series of sketches and works of art has been preserved, displaying the interior and outside of Chinese buildings and the kinds of furniture. Also preserved from the 16th century are a collection of chairs made of wood or lacquered wood, that hold an astonishing resemblance to representations of ancient chairs.
Just the same as in Egypt, there were two standard chair forms in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair is constructed both with or without arms however never without the square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to hold up the back. In one image, however, the stiles were delicately curved by the arms for the purpose of conform correctly to the form of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of its back). Each of the three sections are mortised on the yoke-like top rail. While the innovation of this back splat then had an introduction for English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that merely to a restricted capability support corner joints (and furthermore were loose as well) signify a signature solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which stops around the rounded staves. All members are round in section or is given rounded edges—referable as may be to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and may have had a plaited seat. These chairs required the sitter to remain stiff and upright; for when too much pressure is exerted on the back, the chair has a habit of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this period armchairs likely were reserved only for older individuals in the family, for they were given great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have been brought to China from the West. It does not vary very much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a variation in that the top rail is elegantly joined to the two legs of the stool by use of a curved member, which is often possessing metal mounts. From a Western perspective the resulting effect of these furniture designs is stylized. The constructive and decorative parts are combined in a way that is both naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is a result of the fact that the individual parts do not seem to have been adjoined by means of either glue or screws, but have been mortised with 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 put its name on the chair. Paintings display a style of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between, stitched to produce a pattern of tiny pads. The front board and a similar board at the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture in traveling which, in the same time, had 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 interiors of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this style of chair can also be made in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not certain that the innovation actually was instigated in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slim dimensions; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in considerable numbers, as can be seen from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a row of such chairs lined up by a wall. The form asserts itself with its elegant 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 style—that is to say, as developed in Paris around 1750—disseminated over 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 elegance. The seat adheres to the human body and allows a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally 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 cover all the joints, which are constructed on craftsmanlike methodology even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of them employ wood of rather thick dimensions; but all the members are deeply molded, all extra wood has been cut away, and finer examples may be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative engravings. The wood might be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry may be used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is sometimes used rather than upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more differentiated in style than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles through 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 reknowned 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 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, indicate 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