ADF News

Out of each of the furniture forms, the chair could be the paramount one. While the majority of other forms (save the bed) are meant to support objects, the chair supports the human form. The term chair is intended to be viewed here in the largest sense, from stool to throne to derivative types like a bench and sofa, which may be viewed 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 intriguing as its history as an art and craft. The chair is not just a physical support and/or an aesthetic creation; it historically was semiotic of social ranking. In the Medieval royal courts there were significant connotations between being led to a chair with arms, or a chair with a back but without arms, or worse having to make do with a stool. Since the last century, the director’s or manager’s chair has been regarded as a signifier of superior rank, and even in democratic governments the speaker sits on an elevated floor.

In a furniture purpose, the chair encompasses a wealth of various makes. There are chairs designed to fit man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and for his position in society (the executive chair, the throne). From past days there were chairs for births (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs to die in (the electric chair). We make chairs with one, two, three, and four legs, chairs with or without arms, and chairs with or without backs. We can make chairs that can be folded and put away, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.

Our contemporary lifestyle has developed new chairs for use in automobiles and aircraft. All these chair shapes has changed to match to different human needs. Because of its unique link with man, the chair appears to its full significance only when in employ. Although it is irrelevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a bureau if there is anything inside or not, a chair is really seen best and judged best by a person sitting on it, for chair and sitter suit one another. Thus the different limbs of a chair are given names according to the elements of a human form: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.

Because the elemental purpose of a chair is to support the body, its worth is judged firstly for how well it measures up to this practical job. Within the structure of the chair, the chair maker is restricted by the static legislation and principal measurements. Under these restrictions, however, the chair builder has marvellous freedom.

The history of the chair lasted over a period of several thousand years. There is evidence of civilizations that had distinctive chair shapes, as expressions of the premier object in the industries of skill and design. Out of those civilisations, special 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 reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI.

Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the items of careful scheme, are now a finding from findings made in tombs. One of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The iconic Egyptian chair would have had four legs designed akin to those of an animal, a curved seat, leading to a sloping back supported with vertical stretchers. From this a stable triangular structure was crafted. There appeared to be no significant variation between the structure of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common populace. The simple change exists in the kind of ornamentation, in the particulars of costly inlays. The Egyptian folding stool in all probability was created as an easily packed seat for army officers. As a camp stool the type continued for much later points in time. But the stool then played the use of a ceremonial seat, its technical task as a folding stool fast forgotten. This can already be noted, from as early as 1366–57 BC in two stools, created in ebony with ivory inlay ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were constructed in the construction of folding stools but are not able to be folded because the seats were formed of wood. The simplistic construction of the folding stool, made of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and bear a seat of leather or fabric set between them, was seen again somewhat later in the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The best recognised of those is the folding stool, from ashwood, now seen at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).

Greece and Rome
The iconic Greek chair, the klismos, is recognised not in any ancient item still in form but as seen in a large amount of pictorial items. The most well known is the klismos displayed on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial place just out of Athens (c. 410 BC). It is a chair with a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of them can be shown. These strange legs were understood to be created with bent wood and were in that case had a large amount of pressure with the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat would have been therefore super strong and were plainly pointed out.

The Romans emulated the Greek chair; designs of statues of seated Romans show designs of a heavier and are a somewhat more crudely crafted klismos. Both types, light and heavy, were seen again as part of the Classicist time. The klismos style is evidenced in French Empire furniture, in English Regency, and in particular brands of considerable individuality within Denmark and Sweden during 1800.

China
The history of the chair in China cannot be tracked as well as the progression of the chair in Egypt and Greece. Since the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) a full series of drawings and paintings had been kept safe, with images of the interiors and outside of Chinese households and their furniture. Another preservation from the 16th century are a collection of chairs crafted from wood or lacquered wood, that hold an amazing likeness to representations of older chairs.

As were the designs in Egypt, two iconic chair forms existed in China: a chair that had four legs and a folding stool. That four-legged chair is found both with or without arms though always having a square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to support the back. In one design, however, the stiles are delicately curved on top of the arms in order to suit the structure of the S-shaped back splat (the basic upright of a chairback). Together, the three parts are mortised in the yoke-like top rail. While the idea of this back splat then had an influence on English chairs within the Queen Anne period, wooden members that merely to a particular limit reinforce corner joints (and furthermore were loose into the bargain) indicate a design particular to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which ends over the rounded staves. Each member is round in section or has rounded edges—a left over maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not comfortable and may have had a plaited bottom. These chairs required of the sitter to remain stiff and upright; for if too much weight is pushed on the back, the chair has a tendency to topple over. In patriarchal Chinese houses of this period armchairs likely were reserved for elderly people, for they were greatly esteemed.

The Chinese folding stool is believed to have come to China from the West. It does not differ much from the Egyptian or Scandinavian folding stools, but it possesses a variation in that the top rail is prettily fixed to the two legs of the stool by means of a curved member, which is often provided with metal mounts. From a Western understanding the resultant effect of these two furniture forms is stylized. The construction and decorative issues are combined in a style that is all at once both naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an outcome of the way that the individual parts do not appear to have been constructed by use of either glue or screws, but were mortised with one another and locked into position in the style of a Chinese puzzle.

Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also put its signature on the chair. Works of art project a type of chair with a relatively unrefined wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, having only 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 at the back could be folded after loosening some little iron hooks. Therefore the chair was a portable piece of furniture for traveling which, during the same period, gave the status of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.

The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered style of chair can be found in engravings of the inside of wealthy Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, as well as in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. While this type of chair might also be made in countries where Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won acclaim, it is not determined that the form actually started in The Netherlands. Normally, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of thin measurements; they are occasionally baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is clearly a bourgeois piece of furniture and was manufactured in vast quantities, as can be surmised from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which a whole row of this kind of chairs lined up along a wall. The style asserts itself by its elegant proportions and fine 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 to say, as created in Paris around 1750—spread through most of Europe and has been imitated or copied into the mid-20th century. The design owes such popularity to a combination of leisure and charm. The seat adheres to the human body and grants a relaxed sitting position. The back is bow-shaped, the legs curved. Usually the seat and back are upholstered, and there are small upholstered pads on the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back disguise all the joints, which are stable, constructed on craftsmanlike principles despite the absence of stretchers between the legs.

French Rococo chairs and imitations thereof use wood of fairly thick dimensions; but all the members are deeply molded, all superfluous wood has been cut away, and more upmarket items can be further embellished with intricately delicate and decorative woodwork. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry is often used for all of the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; canework is occasionally used as an alternative to upholstery.

English chairs in the 18th century were more varied in style than the French. The French preference for stylistic uniformity, which disseminated from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles within 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 popular 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 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 reception desks in Sydney contact Fast Office Furniture today and check our specials.