Take a Seat: Exploring the Chair Throughout History

• Interior Design Trends

By: Rick Hess/Mae Case, DI

Everywhere you go, people are doing it. People do it at home and at the workplace constantly. You’ll find people doing it while waiting for the bus or at restaurants while eating. We see others do it so often, we don’t bat an eyelash. It’s the one activity practically everyone participates in and we all learn to do it before we walk: Sitting.

Taking a seat is such a mundane action, one that we seem to just do without stopping to think of why. And while humans have sat on the ground since the very beginning, we found evidence dating as far back as the Neolithic period suggesting that human beings decided to start elevating themselves above the ground. Because of this desire to park it on something other than the floor, the evolution of the chair has been a remarkable journey showcasing human creativity, ingenuity and adaptability, from the simple stone “seats” discovered in Neolithic dwellings to the iconic Eames Lounge Chair still popular today.

Exploring the Chair Throughout History

Some cite the Neolithic village of Skara Brae, Scotland, as the earliest known seating, dated as far back 3,200 BC.  Archeologists found homes there that showed evidence of domestication including doors, beds, tables and seating. These seats, composed of stone, show early signs of our human desire to elevate ourselves above the ground.

Early use of stools – three-legged, four-legged, and even folding – in ancient Egypt soon gave way to chairs with backs and arms. Ornate arm chairs made of wood with overlaid gold and silver were found in the tombs of Queen Hetepheres I and King Tutankhamen.  These arm chairs features strong lines and exquisite detail including carved lotus flowers and animal legs. The discovery of King Tut’s tomb in 1922 took the world by storm, and echoes of ancient Egyptian chairs and ornamental motifs can be seen in Art Deco furniture and decorative arts.

The ancient Greeks perfected the form of the klismos chair with legs that curve under the seat before flaring outward. The curved back indicates attention to comfort and ergonomics. Although the chairs themselves didn’t survive, they are frequently depicted in relief sculptures and vases. The simple yet elegant curved lines of the klismos chair made the form popular among Neoclassical designers in the late 18th and 19th centuries.

Although the ancient Egyptians and Greeks used stools with an X-frame of diagonal cross braces, it was the ancient Romans who elevated it to the decorative heights that made it popular all the way into the present day. For centuries, the curule chair was reserved for use by royalty, dignitaries and other important political and religious officials.

In medieval Europe, royal thrones and other ornately decorated seats were symbols of power and authority. Religious officials commonly used X-frame seats known as faldstools, derived from the Roman curule seats. This elaborately detailed seat belonged to the Merovingian King Dagobert I.  “Four protomes of panthers form the feet and legs; the armrests consist of two carved and perforated panels, decorated with rosettes (bottom) and plant motifs (upper register)” (wdl.org). But unlike the Greek klismos chair, medieval furniture reflected the prevailing Christian emphasis to asceticism and the virtues of discomfort rather than ergonomics.

During the Renaissance, the ancient Roman curule form was again reinvented, with different variations appearing in different regions. The dantesca chair with velvet or leather upholstery, and the savonarola chair with a hard back and loose seat cushion became popular in Italy. Chairs with three or four legs, sometimes called stool chairs, also became popular during this time. Previously used only by royalty and other powerful figures, chairs now made their way into the homes of aristocratic and merchant families.

The association of chairs with authority wasn’t limited to Europe. While armchairs were common among the elite in China by the time of the Tang dynasty (618-907), not until the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) did they become a fixture in households of lower rank. Most of the forms we now recognize as traditional Chinese gained popularity during the Ming and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties.

The traditional Chinese art of root carving, carving furniture and objects from the roots and gnarled branches of trees, has also been used to craft chairs from the Tang dynasty forward. The organic beauty of these forms particularly appealed to Buddhists and Daoists who prized harmony with nature.

Baltimore Fancy Side Chair, United States, Early 19th Century

After the opulence of the Baroque and Rococo periods, Neoclassicism reigned during the late 18th century. Mahogany imported from the Americas became more readily available and was used in elegant chairs and other furnishings.  Although most Neoclassical forms reference the straight lines of ancient Greek and Roman architecture, the curves of the curucle and klismos chairs also make a reappearance.

Hill House Chairs by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Scotland, 1903

Like the Neoclassical period, the Victorian era referenced the past, this time through revivals of Gothic, Renaissance and Rococo styles. Dissatisfied with the opulence of these styles, designers of the Arts and Crafts movement returned to clean lines, geometric shapes, and the “honesty” of making the structure and craftsmanship of the piece visible rather than covering it up with upholstery or ornamentation. Charles Rennie Mackintosh used exaggerated heights and rectilinear patterns to dramatic effect in his architecture as well as his furniture.

Kubus Chair by Josef Hoffmann, Austria, 1910

Josef Hoffman also emphasized straight lines and geometric shapes, and many of his furniture designs featured the square and cube. Hoffman often combined linear patterns with rich materials for a luxurious look, as in the Kubus Chair.

Wassily Chair by Marcel Breuer, Germany, 1925

Modernism took off after World War I, and designers began designing furniture with mass production in mind. Compared with earlier styles, Modern furniture is stark, plain and industrial. To create affordable and lightweight furniture, designers turned to tubular steel, usually plated with chrome, and bent plywood, which eliminated many of the joints required in more traditional pieces.  Marcel Breuer’s Wassily Chair is a perfect example of a chair stripped down to the basics. The tubular steel frame is completely bolted together and uses no welding, while slings of Eisengarn fabric cradle the body.

Barcelona Chair by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Germany, 1929

Perhaps one the most furniture famous designs of the 20th century is the Barcelona Chair, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for the Pavilion of the Weimar Republic  at the 1929 World Exposition in Barcelona.  Like the architecture of the pavilion, also designed by Mies, the Modernist furnishings display the honesty of the Arts and Crafts movement along with the minimalism of the new Modern style. Yet even in this classic of Modernism we can see the influence of the ancient Roman curule chair in the diagonal cross braces.

Plastic Chairs by Charles and Ray Eames, United States, 1948

Another iconic chair of the 20th century, designed by Charles and Ray Eames, took advantage of a relatively new material: petroleum-based plastic. Their molded plastic chairs were designed with mass production in mind and are still produced today. “The need for well-designed, moderately priced furnishings for the vast majority of people; furnishings that could be easily moved, stored and cared for, thus meeting the demand of modern living.” Charles and Ray Eames

Eames Lounge Chair 670 by Charles and Ray Eames, United States, 1956

Mixing comfort and luxury, the Eameses created their iconic lounge chair and ottoman in 1956. Using a method of bending plywood pioneering by Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen, it was also designed with mass production in mind. The chair is composed of three pieces bolted together and onto the pedestal. The result is a classic, comfortable chair still in high demand today.

Clearly, chairs are more than just objects to sit on. We lounge in them. We create, solve, share and think while seated. For now, the chair remains a comforting fixture in our society, necessary to all that we do but so ubiquitous that we don’t give it a second thought. Will there ever come a time when we will no longer rely on a chair for our day-to-day activities? With rapid advances in technology now greatly affecting how humans relate to one another (or even ourselves), it will be interesting to see how the chair will morph to keep up with our evolving lifestyles.

Sources:

Koenig, G., & Eames, C. (2005). Charles & Ray Eames, 1907-1978, 1912-1988: Pioneers of mid-century modernism. Köln: Taschen.

Miller, J. (2005). Furniture. New York: DK.

Rabun, J.H., Kendall, C.L., & Rabun, J.L. (2013). The Anglicized and Illustrated Dictionary of Interior Design. Boston: Pearson.

Stimpson, M. (1987). Modern furniture classics. New York: Whitney Library of Design.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/history/articles/skara_brae/

http://numismatics.org/collection/1935.117.358

http://www.wdl.org/en/item/641/

http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/206995

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_chair

http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/20486

http://www.homedecorideas.eu/home-furniture/best-chairs-i/

https://shop.classicdesignitalia.com/en/products

Here I was, interviewing the architect Witold Rybczynski about his new book, an appreciation of the chair and its 5,000-year history, and I was doing it from a standing desk. Nearby, I had a perfectly tolerable chair, with snazzy features like a mesh-fabric seat, pneumatic seat-height adjustment, and polyurethane armrests. But it wasn’t looking so appealing, perhaps because the American Heart Association had just ruined chairs for me by advising people to sit less and move more, so as to avoid diabetes and cardiovascular disease. I asked Rybczynski if he felt the chair was unfairly maligned in the Age of Standing Desks and Office Exercise Balls.

“I really don’t think we’re in the age of the standing desk,” Rybczynski responded. “I think it’s a fad which will come and go. People have always worked standing up—Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway.” (Treadmill desks, in Rybczynski’s book, are summarily dismissed as “silly.”) Today’s health warnings, he added, are about breaking up lengthy periods of sitting with movement, not about chairs themselves.

Rybczynski decided to write about the chair in part because it uniquely combines fashion and functionality. He was also struck by the fact that, unlike weaponry or communications technology, chairs don’t necessarily get “better” over time. “If you’re sitting in a Windsor chair, that’s the same chair, for all practical purposes, that George Washington and Benjamin Franklin sat in,” he said. “Nothing else from that time, other than the [U.S.] Constitution, has survived [in such usable form].” The history of the chair, in other words, is less evolutionary than it is cultural. “The way we choose to sit, and what we choose to sit on, says a lot about us: our values, our tastes, the things we hold dear,” Rybczynski writes in his book, Now I Sit Me Down. You are how you sit.

“An old model of a chair can be just as useful as it ever was,” he told me. “And that really sets it apart from most or at least many technologies, like, say, a smartphone, which changes every year. An old smartphone in 20 years will be just a curiosity. It won’t have any functional purpose.” (Of course, not all sitting furniture is functionally timeless. Imagine eating pasta one-handed while reclining on an ancient Roman dining couch. It helped that wealthy Romans had servants.)

The first chair Rybczynski was able to identify in the historical record was not a physical chair but a sculpture of one from the Cycladic islands in the Aegean Sea, dated to the period 2,800 - 2,700 B.C. The figurine depicts a musician playing a harp while sitting in what looks like a typical kitchen chair, with a straight back and four legs. By the time of the ancient Egyptians, sitting was a matter of status: Everyone sat on stools or on the ground, but chairs with backs or armrests were reserved for the elite.

In the fifth century B.C., the Greeks invented the klismos, which featured curved legs and a curved backrest, and which Rybczynski described to me as “one of the most beautiful chairs made by anybody.” Ever. In his book, he argues that chairs “of equal elegance” to the klismos didn’t emerge for more than 2,000 years, until the “golden age” of chairs in the 18th century, when a flurry of creative craftsmanship and global trade produced ornate items like the French Louis XV armchair and Chinese/English cabriole-legged furniture.

In ancient Greek art, “virtually everybody [is] sitting in a klismos chair. We have women, men, gods, and clearly important people, musicians, workers,” Rybczynski told me. It was a comfortable, “democratic chair,” not a throne. The klismos is also mysterious: It appeared out of nowhere, with a design that was original rather than a variation on a past style, and then disappeared for millennia, only to reemerge as part of the Greek Revival movement in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

The fifth-century tombstone of Xanthippos, a Greek shoemaker. He’s sitting—comfortably, one imagines—on a klismos. (Wikimedia)

In the Middle Ages, sitting was once again socially stratified. (This back-and-forth between democratic and hierarchical sitting customs has been occurring throughout history. Compare the executive, manager, and secretary chairs of the 1960s with today’s standard-issue, egalitarian Aeron office chair. The technical name for my chair at work is a “Mesh-Back Manager’s Chair,” but it’s not just given to managers.) Ordinary people tended to possess little furniture and sat on whatever was available—a bench, a barrel, the ground. Chairs with arms and backs were reserved for Very Important People. The 16th-century Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder captured these dynamics in his many depictions of peasant life.

The long benches that were common at tables in the Middle Ages, as shown in Bruegel’s “Peasant Wedding.” One man, likely the bride’s father, is sitting in a chair with a back. (Wikimedia)

Today’s iconic chairs include the made-for-TV-watching recliner, the “ergonomic task chair,” and especially the monobloc plastic chair. The latter can be mass-produced and sold cheaply, and has therefore spread rapidly around the world, becoming perhaps the most widely used chair on the planet. The chairs are a reminder of the homogenizing effect of globalization, but they also subtly testify to local innovation, according to Rybczynski. Plastic chairs are rarely imported; instead, manufacturers in developing countries typically buy used plastic-molding equipment from developed countries and make chairs that “have local motifs worked into them. It may be the color of the chair. Often the backs are decorated in ways you might not find if you just go down to Home Depot.”

The future of the chair, Rybczynski writes, may lie somewhere between the ergonomic task chair and the monobloc—“between a chair that can adapt to the widest possible range of postures and body sizes, and an inexpensive chair for the masses.”

A monobloc chair in the destroyed Syrian town of Kobani (Osman Orsal / Reuters)

Rybczynski’s most striking point is that there’s nothing natural, nothing inevitable, about humans sitting on chairs, despite their 5,000-year-plus history. There are two types of people in the world, at least within the remit of Rybczynski’s study: those who sit on the floor and those who sit on chairs. In Now I Sit Me Down, Rybczynski elaborates on the distinction:

In a classic study of human posture around the world [in the 1950s], the anthropologist Gordon W. Hewes identified no fewer than one hundred common sitting positions. “At least a fourth of mankind habitually takes the load off its feet by crouching in a deep squat, both at rest and at work,” he observed. Deep squatting is favored by people in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America, but sitting cross-legged on the floor is almost as common. Many South Asians cook, dine, work, and relax in that position. Sedentary kneeling, that is, sitting on the heels with the knees on the floor, is practiced by Japanese, Koreans, and Eurasians, and also used by Muslims at prayer.

Rybczynski hasn’t been able to identify clear, consistent patterns for why the world cleaved into floor-sitting and chair-sitting cultures. You’d think, for example, that people in cold, wet climates would be more likely to sit on chairs, so as to avoid the unpleasant ground. But the Japanese, who endure frigid winters, have traditionally sat on floor mats, while the ancient Egyptians, who lived in a warm, dry climate, are thought to have invented the folding stool. Nor is chair-sitting necessarily a matter of lifestyle; some nomadic groups move about with collapsible furniture, while others don’t. Nor is it always a product of economic or technological advancement; the prosperous Japanese were long aware that people in other parts of the world sat on chairs—they just chose not to. Some societies, like China, have transitioned from being predominantly floor-sitting cultures to being predominantly chair-sitting cultures. Others, like India, idiosyncratically mix the two approaches.

An Indian woman makes bread. Her shelves are at a low height, which is common in floor-sitting cultures. (Mansi Thapliyal / Reuters)

What Rybczynski did find is that whether you live in a floor-sitting or chair-sitting society has an impact on much more than how you sit. It can influence everything from your clothing to your house layout to your muscle development, he writes:

If you sit on floor mats, you are likely to develop an etiquette that requires removing footwear before entering the home. You are also more likely to wear sandals or slippers rather than laced-up shoes, and loose clothing that enables you to squat or sit cross-legged. Floor-sitters tend not to use tall wardrobes—it is more convenient to store things in chests and low cabinets closer to floor level. People who sit on mats are more likely to sleep on mats, too, just as chair-sitters are more likely to sleep in beds. Chair-sitting societies develop a variety of furniture such as dining tables, dressing tables, coffee tables, desks, and sideboards. Sitting on the floor also affects architecture: walking around the house in bare feet or socks demands smooth floors—no splinters—preferably warm wood rather than stone; places to sit are likely to be covered with soft mats or woven carpets; tall windowsills and very tall ceilings hold less appeal. Lastly, posture has direct physical effects. A lifetime of sitting unsupported on the floor develops muscles not required for chair-sitting, which is why chair-sitters, unaccustomed to sitting cross-legged, soon become uncomfortable in that position. And vice versa. People in India regularly sit up on train seats and waiting-room benches in the cross-legged position, which they find more comfortable than sitting with feet hanging down.

As Rybczynski suggests, the arc of history doesn’t necessarily bend toward chairs, let alone better chairs. From the klismos to the Aeron to the mat on the floor, though, humans have shared a need to rest their weary feet. Especially after a long day at a standing desk.