Those Designing Europeans

Ars gratia artis, art for art's sake, was a centuries-old plea in Europe. No longer. On the Continent today, art, architecture and artisanship are aimed at luring the consumer in addition to rewarding the creator. Reaching out from their venerable tradition of studio work, European designers, handling new materials and technologies, are raising the quality of life.

In the U.S. and most of Western Europe, for example, the fashionable look for the '75 woman is layered, long-skirted, booted and topped off with a cape; and much of it came together in the drawing rooms of Paris and Rome couturiers. The soft-goods departments in stores from Tokyo to Beirut are beginning to look less like hospital wards than fashion salons, with towels by Pierre Cardin, sheets by Saint Laurent and table linen by Finland's Marimekko.

Best Practitioners. In short, a good part of the world now recognizes that Western European designers are the very best practitioners of the art. Today's tableware from Scandinavia, watches from Switzerland, furniture and automobiles from Italy and clothing from France are, in the opinion of many authorities, the pre-eminent and handsomest products in their fields (see color pages).

Now Europeans are adding that special sense of design not just to individual items but to whole "environments": the room that surrounds a piece of furniture, the factory where an automobile is built. The most successful practitioner of this design proliferation, as well as one of the Continent's most talented designers, is France's Pierre Cardin, that shrewd fantasist who has tacked his name on to just about anything that can be nailed, glued, baked, molded, bolted, braced, bottled, opened, shut, pushed or pulled. Says Cardin: "As I designed clothes, I found that I also had to think about the atmosphere in which to show them. That led me into designing my own boutiques, and from there it was only natural for me to expand my horizon." Italy's Gae Aulenti, who recently completed new designs for Fiat showrooms round the world, agrees with Cardin's principle of atmosphere in design. She says, "Here the architect is concerned with everything that is in his building, from the walls to the furniture to the vase for the flowers. I can design everything from a spoon to a city. More and more we are coming to realize that design is not a means in itself but part of a concept, a system, that relates to other things."

Cultural Schlock. If there is a single line that divides the work of Europeans from that of U.S. designers, it is the matter of styling. "A lot of people at first thought that industrial design dealt with superficial aesthetical things, with shape," says Professor Herbert Lindinger of the Technical University of Hannover. "We European designers have been resentful of industrial strategies that have nothing to do with real needs, but with manipulated needs, and we are against the kind of styling that is merely an instrument to increase output and sales."

Not that Europeans themselves are in complete agreement as to what constitutes good design or what separates it from cultural schlock. How can modern designers improve on the Chippendale chair or Duncan Phyfe sofa? Yet West Germany's Lindinger has been "surprised and pleased" by some recent Italian furniture design, and sees the basic differences between designs in various European countries in terms of historical and social development. "In Germany as in Britain, we have had a century-long discussion of the social responsibility of the designer. Thus in Britain and Germany, you have an understated, cooled-off design at large factories. You have another kind of design in Italian and French factories--more emphasis on innovation and shape."

A roundup of some of Europe's principal design centers, the men and women behind them, and their current thinking:

GERMANY: BRAINS AND BRAUN. In a nation still acutely aware of its Bauhaus tradition, the star designer of recent years is a 42-year-old former architect who did not study at the famous school or its successor institution at Ulm, but remains true to its discipline. He is Dieter Rams, design director of Braun AG and for 19 years the aesthetic overseer of its famous line of electrical and household products. Rams' creations almost automatically win design awards in competitions round the world, and the Braun toaster and radio are on permanent display in New York City's Museum of Modern Art. Though Braun products serve such relatively humble functions as grinding coffee, lighting cigarettes and playing records, Rams manages to infuse such disciplined gute Form into all that they nearly become works of art. His first radio-phonograph, a simple oblong of wood and white plastic with fingertip controls and a clear Lucite cover, was nicknamed "Snow White's coffin"--and it made competing models look like the seven dwarfs.

Rams is a firm believer in the classic definition of good design: "Form follows function." "All things that are really needed have a clear, clean order," he says. "Think of an airplane cockpit or the design of an autobahn sign. This eye-striking orderliness has meaning, form, shape, size, color."

DENMARK: NATURAL TEXTURE. "A

French artist once said that the Scandinavians had developed a 'metaphysics of the fork,' " remarks Jens Nielsen, chief designer of the Danish State Railway. "We are very much home dwellers, and we have worked out a philosophy of relations with our surroundings." In fact, as the rest of the world has learned since World War II, the metaphysics went far beyond forks to include home furnishings of practically every variety. Based on traditional Danish craftwork, these designs are especially valued for their celebration of natural texture: the finely grained look of oiled teak or the nubby feel of rough-woven linen.

The quintessential Danish master is the founder of Dansk, Jens Quistgaard, 55, who still does the original designs for products that are now turned out in factories from Sweden to Japan. He regards the designer's job as one of almost Rousseau-like simplicity. "I believe that as much of nature as possible should be brought into your nest," says Quistgaard. "You should have as much around you as you can to remind you of good craftsmanship."

Another of the country's leading designers currently is Acton Bjorn, 64, who heads his own firm and has designed such non-hauteur items as a beer bottle for the Moote Cordonnier brewery in France, an electric iron for General Electric, even a special lightweight toilet seat for use in hospitals throughout Scandinavia.

ITALY: CARS AND KITCHEN SCALES. The professional automotive designer probably commands higher status in Italy than anywhere else. The undisputed heir to the tradition of the late Pinin Farina and Nuncio Bertone is a prodigious creator named Giorgietto Giugiaro, the son of a church gilder. Giugiaro went to work for Fiat at 17 and designed his first complete car, the Alfa 2000 Sprint, when he was only 21. At 36, the head of his own firm, Ital Design, Giugiaro has more than a score of auto designs in his gallery of achievements, including the new generation of post-bug Volkswagens, Ghia's classic De Tomaso Mangusta, the Fiat 850 Spider and a new South Korean car.

At Giugiaro's modern new plant in Moncalieri near Turin, 150 staffers design not only cars but also whole automotive plants, one more sign that designers increasingly think in aggregate rather than discrete terms. For the new South Korean car, Ital Design technicians prepared plans for an assembly line, machinery, tools and parts down to nuts and bolts, complete with precise calculations of the cost. Explaining this fascination with integrating design and production, Giugiaro says, "By the time I visualize the lines of a car door, say, I already know what it will cost to manufacture in terms of man-hours."

That philosophy would probably not be disputed by Ettore Sottsass Jr., 57, one of Italy's most versatile industrial designers. Best known for his revolutionary design of Olivetti's Valentine typewriter in 1969, the rumpled, droop-mustachioed Sottsass still devotes most of his time to that company's office systems and machinery but also creates ceramics and glassware for other European clients.

A wide variety of useful products has come from the drafting board of Marco Zanuso, including hairdryers, radios and kitchen scales.

FRANCE: TOUJOURS COUTURE. France has produced first-rank individual designers, some of whom created their most notable work abroad. Raymond Loewy, at 81 the dean of French designers, has lived for more than 50 years in the U.S., where he has produced hundreds of ideas, including the classic "double-fronted" 1953 Studebaker, the new Exxon corporate logo and the living quarters for NASA's Skylab. Next year the Smithsonian Institution will honor Loewy's work with a retrospective exhibition that will eventually be seen in Moscow as well.

Loewy's emphasis on design's commercial and industrial responsibilities is shared by Roger Tallon, 45, whose projects have included the striking new Mexico City subway system. "For me, design is a pipe that does not leak, a bottle top that closes and does not break," says Tallon. "If a designer is not considered an engineer, then this profession has no future." Among his current contracts are designs for new subways in Paris and digital watches for Lip.

French furniture design is dominated by Marc Held, 44, who claims the all but unique accomplishment of having created distinctive products for both the top and bottom of the line. In 1970 Knoll International, the firm that introduced the classic Saarinen "tulip" chair among many other designs, offered the new Held chair, a combination swivel-rocking chair made of leather-covered fiber glass with a rounded base.

Despite the growth of general design, French fashion designers are still lionized. None has enjoyed a more sustained success than Yves Saint Laurent, 38, the boy wonder who blazed onto the haute couture scene at 21 and has stayed at the top ever since. With 80 boutiques round the world selling men's and women's clothing and a wide range of accessories, Saint Laurent rings up sales of $8 million in women's ready-to-wear alone. He has dabbled in towel and sheet designs because they "are like designing scarves," but, unlike Cardin, has declined to venture farther afield of fashion.

In Paris this year, the spring-summer haute couture collections emphasize an elegant simplicity, feminine and slender. Gone is the "tent," except as a thin summer coat, tightly belted. Dresses are either close-fitting sheaths and tubes --as at Saint Laurent, who showed the skinniest of all, faintly reminiscent of the long T shirts popular a while back in ready-to-wear--or fairly full skirted with waists clearly marked by tucks and belts, as Givenchy does them. Suits emphasize the midriff too, with slim skirts, or skirts tucked to the hipbone, worn with jackets that skim the body closely. Jersey, flannel and gabardine are daytime favorites, with the emphasis on navy, white and variations on tones of beige; and the dressier clothes lean to muslins, chiffons and thin crepes in soft prints, like Dior's pointillist patterns, blurring from color to color to color.

What makes European design so successful? Is it because, as Italy's Giugiaro immodestly claims, "the level of taste is higher in Europe than anywhere else in the world"? Perhaps, though many Europeans concede that in some other realms involving taste on an even more rarefied level -- painting, for exam ple -- the center of action has left Europe for the U.S. or elsewhere. Indeed, though most new cultural trends begin in the U.S., Europeans say, they need filtering through the Continental sense of style before becoming internationally acclaimed.

Europe's designers are also among the most ardent believers in the necessity of conserving basic materials, both natural and manmade. Says Britain's Martin Roberts, chief industrial designer for the successful chain of Habitat stores, which offer tasteful, basic home furnishings: "With the world as it is now, we have to restrain ourselves. We have to design to price and to process. People are going to want things that do the job well and last and look good all at the same time." In a way, it would all sound a bit familiar to the late Mies van der Rohe. Less, with the increasing awareness of good design, will become more.

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