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.: [Home Edition]

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...