July 8th, 2010 
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Of all the furniture, the chair may be of paramount importance. While most other items (except beds), designed to support objects, the chair supports your human form. The term chair is intended to be viewed here in the most common sense, from stool to throne to developed types such as a bench or sofa, which can be regarded as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not evidently defined.
The social history of the chair is as exciting as its history as a creative art. The chair is not just a physical support and/or aesthetic item; it historically is a symbol of social place. 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 use a stool. Since the last century, the director’s or manager’s chair has been an indicator of superior standing, as well as in democratic government debate the speaker sits on an elevated floor.
As a furniture creation, the chair is employed for a wealth of various forms. There are chairs structured to match man’s age and physical capabilities (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to indicate his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). Since the olden days there were chairs used for birth (birth chairs); in 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 up, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.
Modern living has developed new chairs in automobiles and aircraft. All these chair types have perfected to conform to different human requirements. Due to its particular link with man, the chair lives to its full significance only when being utilised. Whereas it is not relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau whether there is anything inside or not, a chair is really understood and judged with a person sitting on it, because chair and sitter require the other. Thus the several elements of the chair are labeled like the areas of the human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.
Because the elemental work of a chair is to support a human body, its credit is valued basically for how fully it does measure up to this practical function. In the design of a chair, the maker is restricted by the static regulation and principal measurements. Through these restrictions, however, the chair designer has great freedom.
The history of the chair lasted over an epoch of several thousand years. There are societies that had made significant chair types, seen of the foremost craft in the industries of skill and creativity. Among these cultures, individual mention 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 items of masterful make, are today found from tombs. First of the two is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair would have four legs structured as akin to those of an animal, a curved seat, and a sloping back supported above vertical stretchers. From this design a strong triangular construction was crafted. There was to our knowledge no significant variation in the design of Egyptian thrones and chairs for ordinary citizens. The real variation lies in the level of ornamentation, in the particulars of more valuable inlays. The Egyptian folding stool most probably was crafted for an easily carried seat for army. As a camp stool this kind stayed til much later times. But the stool also then was designed as the role of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical history as a folding stool neglected or forgotten. This can already be noted, from as early as 1366 57 BC in two stools, executed in ebony with ivory inlay work and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They are in the construction of folding stools but can not be folded as the seats are worked of wood. The simple build of the folding stool, being of two frames that spin on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric held between them, is seen but some time later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better known of these is the folding stool, crafted out of ashwood, which is now found at Guldh j (National Museum in Copenhagen).
Greece and Rome
The unique Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not with any ancient fossil still in form but found in a large amount of pictorial evidence. The best recognised is the klismos drawn on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, only two of which would be shown. These curving legs were most likely to have been created of bent wood and were in that case needed to bear extreme pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat had to be therefore very strong and were particularly signified.
The Romans embued the Greek style; some statues of seated Romans show chairs of a heavier and apparently somewhat more crudely designed klismos. Both styles, the light or heavy, were revived within the Classicist era. The klismos style is found in French Empire chairs, in English Regency, and in some special kinds of profound originality within Denmark and Sweden during 1800.
China
The history of the chair in China isn’t able to be followed as long as the history of the chair in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618 907) an unbroken serial of images and artworks has been kept safe, showing the interior and exterior of Chinese buildings and their furniture. Also preserved from the 16th century are a trove of chairs crafted of wood or lacquered wood, that display an astonishing familiarity to designs of previous chairs.
As in Egypt, there were two standard chair designs in China: a chair having four legs and a folding stool. This chair was found both with or without arms, but always with a square seat and straight styles (direct support for the party) with a firm back. In one image, however, were surrounded by slightly curved over the weapon, in order to sit properly form S-shaped sign back (mostly from the vertical Chairback). 3 sections mortised on the yoke-type top rail. While the design of a back splat later had a foundation for English chairs from the Queen Anne period, wooden items that merely to a restricted extent support corner joints (and furthermore were loose in the bargain) indicate a feature exclusive to Chinese chairs. The four legs sit through the seat frame, which ends about the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or has rounded edges references perchance to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and had on occasion a plaited form. These chairs demanded of the sitter to hold themselves stiff and upright; when too much pressure is forced on the back, the chair has a tendency to fall over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this era armchairs most likely were kept for elderly individuals, for they were greatly respected.
The Chinese folding stool is thought to have been brought to China from the West. It is akin so very much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a difference in that the top rail is intricately fixed to the two legs of the stool by a curved member, which is more often than not provided with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the resulting effect of both these furniture items is stylized. The structure and aesthetic parts are combined in a manner that is all at once na ve and refined. The patched up appearance is an outcome of the manner that the individual members do not seem to have been joined together with either glue or screws, but have been mortised into one another and fixed in its place in the style of a Chinese puzzle.
Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also left its name on the chair. Works of art display 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 in the layers, stitched to show up a pattern of small pads. The front board and a similar board in the back could be folded after loosening some small iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a portable piece of furniture while traveling which, in the same period, possessed the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.
The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered type of chair can be evidenced in engravings of the interiors of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this type of chair may also be found in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not decided that the style actually started in The Netherlands. Usually, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of slim shape; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in vast quantities, as can be seen from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is an entire row of this kind of chairs lined up against a wall. The form asserts itself with 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 of forms that is, as created in Paris around 1750 spread over most of Europe and was imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The model owes such popularity to a combination of comfort and elegance. The seat adheres to the human body and allows a relaxed seated position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Generally the seat and back are upholstered, and there are little upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are constructed strongly on craftsmanlike methodology even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.
French Rococo chairs and imitations of those use wood of quite thick measurements; but every member is deeply molded, all extraneous wood has been cut away, and more expensive examples may be further embellished with very delicate and decorative engraving. The wood can be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is used for any upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is occasionally used rather than upholstery.
English chairs from the 18th century were more open in form than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the royal circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and was popular 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 the wealth of diversity in Chairback designs, elegant, pierced, vase forms trademarks or two upright posts connected by horizontal slats (wooden).
Along with a French rococo chair, and the best English chairs of walnut and mahogany, a stick-back chair, relatively unaffected by the stylistic changes in 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 Eug ne Gaillard in France, Henry van de Velde in Belgium, Josef Hoffman in Austria, Antonio Gaud 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 M tro.
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, hint that completely new chair forms will probably be evolved in the future.
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