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Today, 22 April 2008

Yesterday, 21 April 2008

He may be the global darling of design, but fast-talking hyperactive Philippe Starck wants esthetic considerations struck off the menu. Ethics are the order of the day, he believes, if the planet is to be saved.

Starck, now 59 but still edgily young with jeans, sweatshirt, stubble and a just-married fourth wife, this month joined a team of high-flying French civil servants and politicians planning the country's upcoming European Union presidency.

"The only thing that interests me in this world, apart from the love I have for my wife, is not design, but us, our history," he said in an interview.

"We can only survive if united in Europe against the world's new great masters from Asia," said the man who 1 July becomes 'artistic director' of France's six-month EU stint. "We must bring more Europe into France, make people understand this is important."

Up his sleeve?

How exactly he plans to do that on the artistic front remains a secret — as does his biggest-ever future project on the drawing-board "which if I succeed will at last make me feel my life was worth living".

While currently continuing to work on US luxury hotels and upscale restaurants, Starck, whose museum-piece designs range from toothbrushes to fly-swats to sofas to motorbikes, believes beauty for its own sake is a thing of the past.

"In times of light, of civilisation, of peace, the beauty of a chair or lamp, which is more than secondary, can be pleasant, such as in the 1970s or 1980s," he muses in his large minimalist premises.

"The world was more at peace then than today, you could rest."

"But the last five or six years have seen a hallucinatory speedy descent into violence and barbarity," he adds. "There are times when some jobs are justifiable, legitimate, other times when they are not."

Armed with only a pencil

"Given the brutality, the suffering, the mounting deaths, I feel hampered by my means of expression, upset that instead of having a Kalashnikov and a helmet I only have a toothbrush and a pencil."

Because he reckons that more than 300 000 people currently depend on his creations for work, Starck says that though he craves to drop everything and enact his as yet still-secret project to help humanity, he cannot, and must wait some years to extricate himself from celebrity.

But more than ever he is set on drafting green-friendly design and remaining faithful to his 30-year charter of never designing for arms, hard drugs, cigarettes, religious causes or laundered money.

"We cannot be bought," he says.

"There is too much matter everywhere today, and the more matter there is the less human things are. We must work to reduce things, to metamorphose."

So Starck plans this month to launch a supermarket issue wind turbine, a hand-held €300-€400 windmill, the first of a series in different sizes that will be so neat they will be "nearly invisible, zero noise, zero vision".

Next on the drawing-board are transparent solar panels, a solar-and-hydrogen boat especially for use in Venice, not to mention a mega-sized yacht shaped not to make waves and worth a cool $200-million.

"I'm an explorer, a fighter," he said. "We must stop design from degenerating into a fashion phenomenon."

AFP