Of all furniture items, the chair could be the primary one. While most other pieces (apart from the bed) are devised to support objects, the chair supports our human form. The term chair is meant to be said here in the largest sense, from stool to throne to complex forms such as a bench or sofa, which should be viewed 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 interesting as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not merely a physical support and/or aesthetic craft; it was also a symbol of social placement. Within the Medieval royal courts there were significant differences between having a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but no arms, or having to cope with a stool. During the past century, the director’s or manager’s chair has been regarded as iconic of superior status, and even in democratic parliaments the speaker sits on a higher floor.
As its furniture purpose, the chair holds a variety of various forms. There are chairs designed to match man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to show his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). From past times there were chairs to be born in (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs 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 and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern living has demanded new chairs in automobiles and aircraft. Every one of these chair forms have been adapted to fit to growing human desires. From its close link with man, the chair lives to its full advantage only when being used. Although it is irrelevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers if there might be anything inside or not, a chair is really seen and fairly judged with a person sitting in it, because chair and sitter suit each other. Thus the different limbs of a chair were named like the areas of the human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the elementary job of the chair is to support your body, its worth is evaluated principally on how well it does measure up to this practical use. In the build of the chair, the designer is bound with the static laws and principal measurements. Through these regulations, however, the chair builder has awesome freedom.
The history of the chair is an era of several thousand years. There are cultures that have created significant chair shapes, as expressions of the premier object in the areas of technique and design. Out of these such civilisations, individual 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 lives of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the upshot of careful craft, are today a finding from tomb discoveries. The first of these two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The typical Egyptian chair had four legs shaped akin to those of an animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported over vertical stretchers. In this design a stable triangular design was crafted. There seems to be no particular difference from the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common peasantry. The main difference exists in the kind of ornamentation, in the evidence of more costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool likely was designed as an easily portable seat for officers. As a camp stool the chair stayed around until much later days. But the stool then was created as the task of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical job as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can now be seen, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, executed in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were in the structure of folding stools but cannot be folded because the seats were formed out of wood. The easy construction of the folding stool, composed of two frames that turn on metal bolts and support a seat of leather or fabric held between them, can be seen at some time later during the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better recognised of this kind is the folding stool, crafted from ashwood, now found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The iconic Greek chair, the klismos, is found not as any ancient specimen still in form but as in a trove of pictorial material. The archetype is the klismos drawn on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place outside Athens (c. 410 BC). This klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of them can be visible. These unusual legs were possibly crafted with bent wood and were as such needed to bear a large amount of pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints securing the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore very solid and were particularly indicated.
The Romans embued the Greek style; some casts of seated Romans are evidence of a denser and apparently kind of less delicately crafted klismos. Both kinds, light and heavy, were revived in the Classicist era. The klismos influence is evidenced in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in some special kinds of notable iconicism in Denmark and Sweden from 1800.
China
The progression of the chair in China is not able to be tracked as long as chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged folio of drawings and paintings has been preserved, detailing the interior and outside of Chinese buildings and the furniture. Also preserved since the 16th century are a number of chairs constructed from wood or lacquered wood, that hold an amazing familiarity to designs of older chairs.
Like in Egypt, two particular chair forms existed in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. This chair is found both with or without arms although always having its square seat and straight stiles (standing side supports) to support the back. In one type, however, the stiles are lightly curved above the arms to sit correctly with the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of a chairback). Each of the three limbs had been mortised into the yoke-like top rail. Although the idea of the back splat later had an introduction for English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden items that only just to a particular limit stabilise corner joints (and were loose to top it off) indicate a signature signatory to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which finishes over the rounded staves. Each member is round in section or is given rounded edges—references maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and may have a plaited texture. These chairs required of the sitter to stay stiff and upright; if too much pressure is pushed on the back, the chair has a way of falling over. In patriarchal Chinese households of this period armchairs probably were kept for the senior persons in the family, for they were esteemed greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is presumed to have taken to China from the West. It does not differ that much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a change in that the top rail is prettily held to the two legs of the stool with a curved member, which is generally designed with metal mounts. From a Western understanding the resultant effect of these furniture styles is stylized. The manufacture and decoration aspects are combined in a style that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an upshot of the way that the individual members do not look to have been adjoined by either glue or screws, but are mortised onto one another and fixed in place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also put its mark on the chair. Paintings project a type of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, consisting of two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing between the layers, stitched to bring out a pattern of little pads. The front board and a related board at the back could be folded after loosening some tiny iron hooks. Thus the chair was a portable piece of furniture in traveling which, during the same era, gave the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair can be displayed in engravings of the interior of affluent 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 may also be made in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won critical acclaim, it is not certain that the style actually originated in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of slim shape; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is unquestionably a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in large quantities, as can be seen from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a row of this kind of chairs lined up by a wall. The design asserts itself with its shapely proportions and expensive upholstery in gilt leather or fabric framed with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature of forms—that is, as brought out in Paris around 1750—spread over most of Europe and was imitated or copied during the mid-20th century. The model owes such popularity to a combination of relaxation and elegance. 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 over the armrests. Smooth transitions made between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are strongly constructed on craftsmanlike principles in spite of the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof employ wood of rather thick density; but each member is deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been sanded away, and more upmarket chairs may be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative carvings. The wood may be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is usually used for the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; cane is in some cases used instead of upholstery.
English chairs of the 18th century were more differentiated in design than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the premier circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and became the preference 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 popularised 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, suggest 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.
Tags: office cahirs, office furnitureJune 26th, 2010UncategorizedRead More >No Comments
Leave a Reply