MADE IN SWITZERLAND.

An exhibition of Swiss Design has opened at the Museum of Applied Arts in Cologne.

What is Swiss? Toblerone, the Swiss army knife (Karl Elsener, 1897), Univers typeface (Adrian Frutiger, 1954), Max Bill's graphics, USM Haller (1963) system furniture? Cologne's Applied Arts Museum has an 11-year tradition of coupling events with the annual Furniture Fair. Over 200 Swiss-made contemporary design objects, furniture, industrial design, graphics, textiles and jewellery, were selected with the help of Zurich's Design School and the Swiss magazine Hockparterre. Roland Eberle, who exhibits his school furniture system Scuola Box and lamps, also designed the exhibition with a white glowing pneumatic snake as continuously running display shelf and backdrop.

The game of nationality labelling has increased in proportion to the creeping threat of globalized markets. As described in the accompanying catalogue, when asked if there was such a thing as a regional signature, Swiss designers (gathered in Lausanne) were either offended, suspicious as to where the question was leading, or claimed to follow their own individual approaches. In a small landlocked nation, did they fear being geographically defined, put down as provincial?

In contrast other essayists, architects, historians and critics, have no trouble in defining Swiss characteristics: meticulous workmanship, aesthetic refinement, ideas carried through with regard for their consequences, appropriate materials engineered down to the smallest detail, Such qualities are apparent over time, from Rudolf Lehni's do-it-yourself picture frames (1976), Willy Guhl's garden chair made by Eternit (1954), or Hans Coray's Landi chair, holed like Swiss cheese, for Switzerland's 1938 national fair, to contemporary furniture by Hannes Wettstein or Urs and Carmen Greutmann. All are products of a rich, industrialized, Western country, with a moral abhorrence (inversely proportional to its collective bank balance) of displaying wealth through superfluous ornamentation.

Are definitions so easy? As an outsider HansPeter Schwarz, Rector of Zurich's Design and Art School, previously at Frankfurt's Architecture Museum and Karlsruhe's Media Centre, points out the difference between Gestalt and design. In the German language Gestalt is the thorough analysis of a problem, as opposed to the more superficial design. Design can be fashion but Gestalt is for ever. Swiss designers also labour under the dichotomy of being exhorted to 'cross borders', to break out of their small alpine landscape, and simultaneously be aware of identity (not necessarily national). Design may move on, hut the Swiss still retain their thorough education system and subsequent inexhaustible enthusiasm in the search for appropriate design solutions, which will see them in good stead for the next century.