From each of the furniture forms, the chair might be of most importance. While most of the other forms (save the bed) are devised to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair is intended to be said here in the wider sense, from stool to throne to further types for example a bench and 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 obviously labeled.
The social history of the chair is as stimulating as its history as a creative art. The chair is not only a physical support and aesthetic object; it is also symbolic of social rank. From the Medieval royal courts there were plain connotations between having a chair with arms, on a chair with a back but without arms, or having to sit on a stool. During the 20th century, a director’s and/or manager’s chair has risen an identifier of superior position, and even in democratic governments the speaker sits on a higher level.
In its furniture form, the chair ranges from a range of different models. There are chairs structured to match man’s age and physical abilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to connotate his standing in society (the executive chair, the throne). In historical days there were chairs used for birth (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs to die in (the electric chair). There are chairs with one, two, three, and/or 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.
Our contemporary lifestyle has demanded new chairs in automobiles and aircraft. All these chair shapes have changed to fit to differing human desires. Due to its significant importance with man, the chair lives to its full meaning only when in use. Although it makes no difference to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a set of drawers if there are items inside or not, a chair is understood best and fairly regarded by a person utilising it, for chair and sitter complement the other. Thus the individual areas of the chair are given labels according to the elements of a human shape: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the elemental purpose of the chair is to support the human body, its value is tested principally from how completely it does measure up to this practical role. In the build of the chair, the chair maker is restricted for certain static law and principal measurements. In these restrictions, however, the chair designer has large freedom.
The history of the chair was an epoch of several thousand years. There were civilizations that had made significant chair forms, as seen of the leading task in the arenas of craft and creativity. From these peoples, special mention 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 ascendancy of Louis XV and Louis XVI.
Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the construct of expert scheme, are today found from tomb discoveries. The first of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair would have had four legs shaped akin to those of an animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. From this design a strong triangular construction was obtained. There appeared to be no particular change in the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for regular non-royals. The simple difference lied in the kind of ornamentation, in the choice of expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most likely was created to be an easily carried seat for army. As a camp stool this form existed for much later times. But the stool then also played the purpose of a ceremonial seat, its technical task as a folding stool ignored or forgotten. This can from today’s evidence be observed, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, crafted in ebony with ivory inlay decoration and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were constructed in the form of folding stools but cannot be folded because the seats are created from wood. The easy manufacture of the folding stool, consisting of two frames that spin on metal bolts and have a seat of leather or fabric fastened between them, is seen again at some time later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best recognised of these is the folding stool, made of ashwood, found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The typical Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not with any ancient specimen still around but found in a large amount of pictorial objects. The iconic kind is the klismos depicted on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location by Athens (c. 410 BC). The klismos is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of these legs can be visible. These creative legs were understood to be manufactured with bent wood and were as such needed to bear huge pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore super solid and were particularly denoted.
The Romans borrowed from the Greek style; evidence of models of seated Romans show examples of a denser and in appearance rather less intricately designed klismos. Both features, the light and the heavy, were popularised during the Classicist era. The klismos design is known in French Empire design, in English Regency, and in particular forms of notable iconicism around Denmark and Sweden around 1800.
China
The ancestry of the chair in China isn’t able to be traced as well as chairs in Egypt and Greece. Since the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an unbroken folio of images and artworks has been kept, displaying the insides and exterior of Chinese buildings and the designs of furniture. Also preserved from the 16th century are a number of chairs crafted from wood or lacquered wood, that possess an astonishing familiarity to pictures of previous chairs.
Just like in Egypt, there existed two iconic chair designs in China: a chair with four legs and a folding stool. The four-legged chair has been seen both with and without arms however never missing the square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to give support to the back. In one kind, it has been found, the stiles are delicately curved by the arms so as to sit right with the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the main upright of its chairback). All three limbs were mortised in the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the style of the back splat later had an influence on English chairs of the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that would only to a restricted capability stabilise corner joints (and then were loose as well) signify a design exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs pass through the seat frame, which closes around the rounded staves. Each member is round in section or is given rounded edges—an acknowledgement perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is unpleasant to sit in and had on occasion a plaited bottom. These chairs required of the sitter to remain stiff and upright; for if too much weight is forced on the back, the chair has a habit of collapsing. In patriarchal Chinese households of this era armchairs probably were reserved for older people in the family, for they were respected greatly.
The Chinese folding stool is believed to have come to China from the West. It does not vary that much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a variation in that the top rail is elegantly joined to the two legs of the stool in a curved member, which is often provided with metal mounts. From a Western viewpoint the ultimate effect of both of these furniture designs is stylized. The construction and decoration aspects are combined in a manner that is simultaneously naïve and refined. The patched up appearance is an upshot of the fact that the individual members do not appear to have been constructed by means of either glue or screws, but had been mortised onto one another and held in its place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain during the 17th century also had its mark on the chair. Works of art show a style of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, possessing two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between, stitched to produce 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 an easily portable piece of furniture for traveling which, in the same time, 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 inside of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Although this design of chair may also be made in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won preference, it is not decided that the form actually was instigated in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair were smooth, round in section, and of thin measurements; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was crafted in large numbers, as evidenced from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is an entire row of those chairs lined up by a wall. The form asserts itself with its shapely proportions and delicate upholstery in gilt leather or fabric edged with fringes.
France and England: 17th and 18th centuries
The French Rococo chair in its most mature style—that is to say, as created in Paris around 1750—disseminated over most of Europe and was imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The chair owes such popularity to a combination of relaxation and elegance. The seat adheres to the human body and grants a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Normally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads covering the armrests. Smooth transitions achieved between seat frame, legs, and back conceal all the joints, which are constructed on craftsmanlike methods despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof are constructed from wood of rather thick measurements; but every member is deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been removed, and finer chairs can be further embellished with special delicate and decorative engraving. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry may be used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is sometimes used instead of upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more open in form than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which lead from the royal circles in Paris and Versailles over most of France and became the preference 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 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 styles 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 executive furniture in Melbourne contact Fast Office Furniture today and check our specials.
Tags: office cahirs, office furniture