COLUMN ONE : America’s Designs on Europe : Top quality U.S. architectural firms, feeling the pinch at home, are finding work in Europe--and are snapping up some of the most sought-after projects.

On this city’s western edge, Richard Meier, a New York modernist architect, recently unveiled his latest creation, a gleaming white corporate headquarters building on the banks of the Seine.

Meanwhile, in Bercy, on Paris’ eastern edge, Los Angeles avant-garde architect Frank Gehry broke ground last year on a whimsical, new American arts and cultural facility that will be finished in 1993.

Twenty miles outside Paris in Marne-La-Vallee, the new Euro Disney resort provided lucrative work over the last three years for prominent American architects Gehry, Robert Stern, Antoine Predock and Michael Graves. Other American architects, including Robert Venturi, are in line for a second phase of Disney building planned for the future.

“I’ve never seen France more open to American architecture,” Meier commented over a recent lunch in his new building, corporate seat for the French Canal Plus television-movie production company, on the Left Bank Quai Andre Citroen.

The recent passion for top American architects is not limited to France. Meier also has works in progress in two other French cities, as well as in Germany, Luxembourg, Spain and the Netherlands. Gehry, perhaps the most originally American of all the designers, has commissions in Spain, Germany and Switzerland.

I. M. Pei--the late-modernist New York architect who is in the midst of a major redesign of the Louvre Museum in Paris--Stern and Venturi are also busy with jobs across the Continent.

At a time when recession-plagued developers and big spenders have pulled back from making expensive architectural statements in the United States, Europe has come to the rescue. No longer does the elite of American design necessarily strut its best stuff in Houston, Los Angeles or Miami. The cutting edge of American architecture is found more often these days in Paris, Frankfurt, Barcelona or The Hague.

Even tiny Luxembourg is into the American act, with works in progress by Pei, Meier and the Miami-based firm Arquitectonica, headed by the husband-wife team of Bernardo Fort-Brescia and Laurina Spear.

“There is a better market for a certain type of American architecture outside the U.S.,” said Steven Izenour, partner in the Philadelphia-based architectural firm headed by Venturi.

After completing work on a new wing of the National Gallery in London, the Venturi firm this month won an international competition to design a new regional administrative and legislative center in Toulouse, France.

Why are so many American architects working in Europe? During tough economic times, such as those being experienced across the United States, top quality architectural firms are often the first to feel the pinch; many firms have responded, in part, by searching for and finding work in Europe.

But Yale University architecture critic Carter Weisman, author of a recent Pei biography, views the trend as a welcome sign of the quality and maturity of the American work.

“It’s a matter of cross-fertilization,” Weisman said. “For a couple of centuries, the United States relied on foreigners for its ideas. Now we are exporting the product. The fact that more Americans are working abroad reflects the quality of work they do and the variety of artistic vision they represent. Frank Gehry, I. M. Pei and Robert Stern could hardly be more different in style. They present quite a menu for the Europeans.”

To some Europeans, the arrival of American architectural talent has been a windfall likened to the Renaissance, when Italian architects and craftsmen came north with refined skills. In addition to a flair for design, the Americans are appreciated for their abilities to deliver projects on deadline and for their attention to detail.

“A few years ago,” said Francis Rambert, editor of the monthly architectural magazine d’A (d’Architectures), “the Americans didn’t come at all. They thought France was too small and they had a lot of work in the States. Now we have all the great architects in the world working in France--Americans alongside Japanese alongside French.”

In France, American architects have also benefited from the relatively recent phenomenon of government-sponsored international competitions for major projects, sparked by French President Francois Mitterrand’s personal passion for architecture.

Mitterrand’s grands projets , all submitted for blind competitive bidding, include: the $500-million Bastille Opera designed by Canadian architect Carlos Ott (though Mitterrand is said to have favored Meier); the $700-million Grande Arche de la Defense by Dane Johan Otto von Sprekelsen; the $1.4-billion new national library by Frenchman Dominique Perrault, and Pei’s $1.2-billion Louvre Museum redesign.

Besides changing the face of Paris, the huge government projects created an atmosphere of architectural revival and innovation. Also, a 1983 government decentralization program granted more powers to local authorities, prompting a wave of smaller-scale international competitions for urban renewal projects such as the one in Toulouse.

Commissions for architects working in France usually range between 7% and 10% of the cost of the project. But Pei is rumored to have received 16% of the Louvre project. In difficult economic times, even the relatively small $7-million commission that Venturi is expected to receive for the Toulouse project can be a lifesaver.

Thomas Vonier, an American architect working in private practice in Paris, does warn that the commissions are sometimes deceptive, since almost every American firm working in Europe has a local partner that receives a cut of the fees. “It is a little unclear how much of the money actually makes its way back to the U.S.,” Vonier said.

In addition, Vonier said, he has begun to notice the beginning of a backlash by European architects against the imported American talent. The highly publicized commissions gained by American architects at Euro Disney and in London’s troubled Canary Wharf project have created a mood of resentment in the professional ranks that didn’t exist before.

Nevertheless, for the top ranks of American architecture, the European business has at least been a life raft until the U.S. economy recovers.

“There are only two projects I have at home right now,” Meier said. “Most of the rest are in Europe.”

True, one of the two Meier home-grown projects is the massive Getty Center in the foothills of Los Angeles’ Santa Monica Mountains, a six-building, $360-million development known in architectural circles as the “commission of the century.” The other is the Long Island, N.Y., North American headquarters for Swissair.

But Meier’s firm, with 75 employees in New York and 65 in Los Angeles, has 11 other projects overseas, 10 in Europe and one in Singapore. His seven most recently completed projects, including the dramatic L-shaped Canal Plus building with its distinctive rooftop “urban window” facing the Seine, are all in Europe.

Meier, 58, started working in Europe only in 1984 after the opening of his celebrated Museum for the Decorative Arts in Frankfurt. Before that, he was known almost exclusively for his work in the United States, such as the Atlanta High Museum of Art.

All of Meier’s drawings and detail work are still done at his offices in the United States. When the Canal Plus building was under construction, Meier said he had 17 American staffers on the ground supervising the work. But the lopsided European proportion of his recent workload has concerned the silver-haired, Newark, N.J.-born architect.

“Unfortunately,” he said, “I think there is more of an appreciation of the art of architecture here than there is at this moment in the United States.”

Miami architect Fort-Brescia agreed in a telephone interview, saying: “Europe sees architecture more in an artistic sense. Europeans are looking for something special, something new. That’s why the American architects working in Europe these days are generally more on the abstract side, generally modernists like Meier.”

Fort-Brescia and his wife first made their mark in South Florida with such buildings as the Atlantis, an avant-garde residential building with a hole in its center, planted with a palm tree; it was featured in the stylish opening to the television series “Miami Vice.” They also received praise recently for the new Bank of America office building complex on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills.

But with the slowdown in the American economy and the reluctance of business executives to spend money on architectural frills, they expanded their search for commissions to South America and Europe. Their most recent European projects include the new headquarters for the Banque de Luxembourg, a 14-level project (eight floors underground, six stories above) in the business center of the Grand Duchy, and a 1,000-acre resort on the Algarve Coast of Portugal.

The Florida firm is also one of six finalists in an international competition to construct a major new urban center on the Place de Frankfort in Lyon, France’s second-largest city. Their competitors for the lucrative Lyon commission include three lesser-known Paris firms, the Milan, Italy, firm of famed Italian architect Aldo Rossi and the Tokyo firm of Japanese architect Arata Isozaki.

The recent architectural exchange has not been entirely in one direction across the Atlantic. Swiss architect Mario Botta, for example, won the commission for the San Francisco Museum of Art scheduled for completion in 1995.

Italian Rossi was named as the architect for the new South Bronx Academy of Art. One of the most highly sought architectural prizes, the design for the new $55-million Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, went to German designer Josef Paul Kleihues.

Despite the occasional exception, the economic doldrums in the United States have cut into the business of all of the top architectural firms, foreign and domestic, seeking work in North America. American architects are finding more opportunities in Europe than they are in their native land.

Richard Koshalek, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and authority on contemporary architecture, preferred to describe the transoceanic trend as part of the “internationalization” of architecture.

“The planet has become smaller,” Koshalek said in a telephone interview, “prompting an intriguing exchange between the U.S. and Europe and between the U.S. and Japan.”