Modern Living: 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."