We say that the French have a certain "joie de vivre," but Italians have something else more difficult to label. Italian culture couples a love of beauty with an ability to laugh at itself. The designs of Milan-born architect Alessandro Mendini embrace this attitude with their color and humor -- thou

Decorative, Funny, Ironic, Pop/surrealism/anti-design, Repetition

Twenty minutes to collect 100,000 deutsche marks. Pulsating techno. Whip pans and fast edits. A fiery heroine with dyed-red hair frantically running to save her boyfriend's life. "The initial idea was an image," says 34-year-old director Tom Tykwer. "The image of a woman running." This apparently or

Avant-garde film, Bright, Cartoonish, Chance, Charming, New german cinema, Pop, Repetition, Smart

With the exception of clothes, furniture is the thing with which we live most intimately. We spend our nights sleeping on it, our days working amidst it, our free time lounging on it. We even store our most prized possessions in it. Collaborating with some of the century's most renowned designers, Vi

Bright, Elegant, Late modern, Minimal, Pioneering, Pop, Repetition

Descartes isolated himself in a cabin, set a ball of wax in front of himself, and set about determining what he could know. Martin Heidegger, some 300 years later, saw this thought experiment as all wrong: Descartes should have picked up the wax, used it, molded it. For Heidegger, the truth is reveal

Contemplative, Deconstruction, Ecstatic, Illusive, Phenomenology, Repetition, Spectral, Spiritual