The Slagosphere

From each of the furniture forms, the chair might be primary. While the majority of other items (save the bed) are created to support objects, the chair supports a human form. The term chair is looked upon here in the larger sense, from stool to throne to derivative makes for example the bench and sofa, which might be seen as extended or connected chairs, and whose character (i.e., whether they are intended for sitting or reclining) is not overtly distinuishable.

The social history of the chair is as curious as its history as a creative craft. The chair is not simply a physical support and/or an aesthetic item; it was historically a symbol of social rank. Within the historical royal courts there were important signifiers between sitting on a chair with arms, sitting on a chair with a back but no arms, or worse having to make do with a stool. In the last century, the director’s and/or manager’s chair has become iconic of superior status, and even in democratic government meeting the speaker sits on a higher platform.

As a furniture purpose, the chair can be used for a wealth of different models. There are chairs designed to attend to man’s age and physical condition (the high chair, the wheelchair) and to denote his rank in society (the executive chair, the throne). In historical days there were chairs for births (birth chairs); during the 20th century, there have been chairs for ending life (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, chairs on wheels, and chairs on runners.

Modern living has developed new chairs in automobiles and aircraft. Every one of these chair types has been changed to conform to different human uses. For its close relationship with man, the chair lives to its full importance only when being utilised. Though it isn’t relevant to one’s appreciation of a cupboard or a chest of drawers if there might be items inside or not, a chair is understood and judged best with a person sitting in it, for chair and sitter complement the other. Thus the different parts of a chair were given names corresponding to the elements of the human parts: arms, legs, feet, back, and seat.

Because the first job of the chair is to support a body, its credit is tested principally from how fully it does measure up to this practical use. In the manufacture of the chair, the carpenter is bound in particular static regulation and principal measurements. Through these boundaries, however, the chair builder has extensive freedom.

The history of the chair extends over a period of several thousand years. There are civilizations that made significant chair types, expressions of the highest task in the spheres of skill and art. In those civilisations, a mention 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 lifetimes of Louis XV and Louis XVI.

Egypt
Two ancient Egyptian chair forms, both the result of careful craft, are a finding from tomb findings. The first one of them is a four-legged chair with a back, the other a folding stool. The classical Egyptian chair has four legs formed like those of an animal, a curved seat, and with a sloping back supported by vertical stretchers. In this design a durable triangular structure was crafted. There seemed to be no marked variation from the creation of Egyptian thrones and chairs for common citizens. The main difference lied in the intricacy of its ornamentation, in the selection of more expensive inlays. The Egyptian folding stool probably was manufactured for an easily stored seat for army soldiers. As a camp stool this type persevered for much later times. But the stool also was created as the use of a ceremonial seat, its mechanical history as a folding stool being 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 ornamentation and gold mounts, from the tomb of Tutankhamen. They were in the construction of folding stools but aren’t able to be folded as the seats are formed with wood. The simplistic manufacture of the folding stool, made of two frames that cycle on metal bolts and hold a seat of leather or fabric held between them, is seen again but somewhat later from the Bronze Age folding chairs of Scandinavia and northern Germany. The better known of these is the folding stool, from ashwood, found at Guldhøj (National Museum in Copenhagen).

Greece and Rome
The archetypal Greek chair, the klismos, is seen not in any ancient fossil still in form but from a trove of pictorial evidence. The better known is the klismos drawn on the Hegeso Stele at the Dipylon burial location in outer Athens (c. 410 BC). This is a chair that had a backward-sloping, curved backboard and four curving legs, but only two of those are seen. These curving legs were most likely manufactured of bent wood and were as such put under extreme pressure under the weight of the sitter. The joints fastening the legs to the frame of the seat had to be therefore extremely stable and were particularly denoted.

The Romans embued the Greek design; evidence of statues of seated Romans are designs of a denser and apparently rather more crudely constructed klismos. Both features, light or heavy, were brought back during the Classicist period. The klismos chair is used in French Empire styles, in English Regency, and in particular brands of considerable originality of Denmark and Sweden from 1800.

China
The progression of the chair in China is not able to be followed as long as the progression of the chairs in Egypt and Greece. From the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907) an undamaged collection of sketches and works of art had been protected, displaying the inside and outer parts of Chinese buildings and the designs of furniture. Also kept from the 16th century are a trove of chairs of wood or lacquered wood, that show an amazing resemblance to styles of past chairs.

Same as in Egypt, there were two standard chair forms in China: a chair of four legs and a folding stool. That chair has been seen both with or without arms although always having the square seat and straight stiles (straight side supports) to support the back. In one design, though, the stiles had been marginally curved on top of the arms to conform correctly to the angle of the S-shaped back splat (the central upright of a chairback). Each of the three parts are mortised in the yoke-like top rail. Despite that the idea of a back splat later had an introduction for English chairs during the Queen Anne period, wooden pieces that only to a restricted capability reinforce corner joints (and then were loose to top that off) signify a signature solely to Chinese chairs. The four legs are set through the seat frame, which stops around the rounded staves. All the members are round in section or has rounded edges—referable maybe to the bamboo tradition. The seat is not pleasant and had on occasion a plaited bottom. These chairs required of the sitter to remain stiff and upright; when too much pressure is pushed on the back, the chair has a tendency to topple over. In patriarchal Chinese homes of this period armchairs likely were allowed only for the senior family members, for they were held in great respect.

The Chinese folding stool is understood to have travelled to China from the West. It is akin that much from the Egyptian and Scandinavian folding stools, but it has a variation in that the top rail is delicately fixed to the two legs of the stool by using a curved member, which is often designed with metal mounts. From a Western point of view the resultant effect of these furniture styles is stylized. The structure and aesthetic parts are combined in a manner that is both naïve and refined. The piecemeal appearance is an upshot of the way that the individual parts do not seem to have been joined together by use of either glue or screws, but have been mortised with one another and fixed in position in the style of a Chinese puzzle.

Spain: 17th century
The Golden Age of Spain of the 17th century also put its name on the chair. Artworks project a kind of chair with a relatively crude wooden frame; a back and seat, nailed on, possessing two layers of leather, with horsehair stuffing in between the layers, stitched to produce a pattern of small pads. The front board and a similar board from the back could be folded after loosening some small iron hooks. Thus the chair was a readily portable piece of furniture when traveling which, at the same period, gave the dignity of a four-legged, high-backed armchair.

The Netherlands: 17th century
A low, square, upholstered design of chair can be seen in engravings of the inside of affluent Dutch homes by Abraham Bosse, a French artist, and also in paintings by the Dutch artists Johannes Vermeer and Gerard Terborch. Though this style of chair can also be found in countries in which Dutch styles of interior decoration and Dutch furniture won favour, it is not determined that the design actually originated in The Netherlands. Generally, the legs of the chair are smooth, round in section, and of thin shape; they are sometimes baluster-shaped (vase-shaped) or twisted. It is patently a bourgeois piece of furniture and was made in impressive quantities, as indicated from one of Abraham Bosse’s engravings, in which there is a row of this kind of chairs lined up against a wall. The form 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 style—that is to say, as brought out in Paris around 1750—conquered most of Europe and has been imitated or copied in the mid-20th century. The design owes the popularity to a combination of relaxation and delicacy. The seat conforms 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 small upholstered pads over the armrests. Smooth transitions are found between seat frame, legs, and back cover all the joints, which are strongly constructed on craftsmanlike methodology even with the absence of stretchers between the legs.

French Rococo chairs and imitations of them are constructed from wood of quite thick density; but all members are deeply molded, all extra wood has been cut away, and more expensive chairs would be further embellished with highly delicate and decorative carving. The wood could be varnished, stained, painted, or gilded. Silk damask or tapestry might be used for all the upholstery on the seat, back, and armrests; crosshatched cane is sometimes used rather than upholstery.

English chairs in the 18th century were more open in design than the French. The French manner for stylistic uniformity, which spread from the aristocratic circles in Paris and Versailles within most of France and found favour 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 commonly known 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.

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