From each of the furniture objects, the chair might be the primary one. While the majority of other objects (save for the bed) are designed to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair is intended to be viewed here in the wider sense, from stool to throne to complex types such as the bench or sofa, which might be considered as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not clearly distinguished.
The social history of the chair is as exciting as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not just a physical support and/or an aesthetic piece; it is historically semiotic of social status. Within the Medieval royal courts there were clear distinctions between being led to a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but no arms, and having to sit on a stool. During the last century, the director’s and/or manager’s chair has developed a signifier of superior status, and even in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on a high-set platform.
In a furniture creation, the chair can be used for a range of various models. There are chairs designed to fit man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to connotate his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). In the past there were chairs to be born in (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs to die in (the electric chair). We design chairs with one, two, three, and four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can have chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern living has demanded particular chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. Every one of these chair forms have evolved to conform to growing human requirements. Due to its particular importance with man, the chair appears to its full significance only when being used. Though it does not make a difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau whether there is anything inside or not, a chair is really seen and regarded best by a person sitting on it, for chair and sitter complement each other. Thus the individual elements of a chair are given names as the names of the human body: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the basic job of the chair is to support your body, its worth is tested generally for how fully it measures up to this practical role. In the structure of the chair, the carpenter is limited within certain static law and principal measurements. Within these restrictions, however, the chair maker has marvellous freedom.
The history of the chair lasts over dates of several thousand years. There is evidence of civilizations that had significant chair shapes, seen of the foremost task in the arenas of technique and design. In these such peoples, particular note must 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 objects of careful craft, were a finding from tomb findings. The first of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair has four legs structured not unlike those of some animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. In this design a strong triangular design was made. There was in our understanding no noteworthy change in the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary populace. The general change lies in the complexity of ornamentation, in the particulars of more valuable inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most likely was designed to be an easily packed seat for army. As a camp stool this stool existed during much later points in time. But the stool also then was made for the use of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical function as a folding stool neglected or forgotten. This can from today’s evidence be observed, 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 made in the form of folding stools but cannot be folded as the seats were worked from wood. The easy manufacture of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that turn on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric secured between them, came again but somewhat later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The most recognised of those is the folding stool, of ashwood, which is now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The significant Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not as any ancient fossil still existing but seen in a trove of pictorial evidence. The archetype is the klismos drawn 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 them would be shown. These creative legs were possibly crafted with bent wood and were thus bore extreme pressure from the weight of the sitter. The joints securing the legs to the frame of the seat are therefore very strong and were plainly pointed out.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek design; designs of casts of seated Romans display chairs of a thicker and are a kind of less intricately built klismos. Both designs, the light or heavy, were seen again as part of the Classicist period. The klismos influence is seen in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in some special kinds of considerable individuality of Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China is not able to be tracked as well as in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken serial of images and paintings has been protected, showing the interiors and outside of Chinese buildings and the furniture. Kept also from the 16th century are a collection of chairs crafted of wood or lacquered wood, that show an astonishing familiarity to representations of past chairs.
Same as in Egypt, there were two particular chair forms in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair is constructed both with or without arms but always with a square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to support the back. In one style, it must be said, the stiles were delicately curved on top of the arms to conform correctly to the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the centre upright of the chairback). Each of the three sections were mortised in the yoke-like top rail. While the design of a back splat exercised an influence on English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that would merely to a restricted extent embolden corner joints (and furthermore were loose to top it off) represent a signature signatory 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 perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and occasionally had a plaited texture. These chairs needed the sitter to remain stiff and upright; when too much weight is pushed on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall over. In patriarchal Chinese households of this epoch armchairs most likely were kept only for elderly people, for they were given great esteem.
The Chinese folding stool is understood to have come to China from the West. It does not vary so very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a change in that the top rail is intricately held to the two legs of the stool by use of a curved member, which is often possessing metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the resultant effect of both these furniture items is stylized. The constructive and decorative parts are combined in a way that is both naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is a result of the way that the individual parts do not seem to have been joined together by means of either glue or screws, but are mortised on one another and held in position in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain in the 17th century also had its name on the chair. Paintings display a design of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between, stitched to show up a pattern of small pads. The front board and a corresponding board in the back could be folded after unscrewing some small iron hooks. In this way the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture for traveling which, in the same era, possessed the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered kind of chair is seen 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 design of chair might also be made in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not certain that the form actually was born in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slender shape; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in impressive amounts, as surmisable from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a whole row of this kind of chairs lined up by a wall. The style asserts itself by virtue of its shapely 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 through most of Europe and was imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The style owes the popularity to a combination of comfort and delicacy. The seat suits to the human body and allows a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are tiny upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions are made between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are constructed strongly on craftsmanlike practices even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof are constructed from wood of rather thick density; but all members are deeply molded, all extra wood has been sanded away, and more expensive chairs would be further embellished with very delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry can be used for all upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is sometimes used rather than upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more differentiated in style than the French. The French touch for stylistic uniformity, which came from the most distinguished circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and was popularised 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
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 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, 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