Modern Living: Those Designing Europeans

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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.