In 1997, the Museum Of Modern Art in New York City announced that Yoshio Taniguchi had won a 10-entrant competition against world-famous architects like Bernard Tschumi and Rem Koolhaas to design the museum's $425 million overhaul. Around the world, art lovers and architecture mavens alike responded with a loud, bemused, "Who?" So unknown was the 67-year-old architect outside his native Japan that one confused well-wisher congratulated Terence Riley, MOMA's chief curator of architecture and design, on selecting "Tony Gucci," ...

Princess Diana took to the world stage in a blaze of white taffeta, as a 19-year-old bride trailed by two tiny attendants. The trumpets that blared on the morning of her wedding on July 29, 1981 did more than mark her arrival at St. Pauls Cathedral: they signaled her uneasy entry into a limelight she would never escape — and, some say, that ultimately killed her. In the days following her 1997 car crash in Paris, as ...

Or, how $90 million can finance lives of noisy ostentationSheik Mohammad Al Fassi, 27, a Saudi Arabian princeling who has lived in the U.S. for four years, keeps stumbling into the limelight. When he Lived in Beverly Hills, Calif., he had the nude statuary outside his mansion painted in rather vivid flesh tones; the mansion was later gutted by fire. Then he dropped a few million here and a few million there . Last week the sheik's profligacy earned ...

Be inconspicuous. If there's one tenet of the legendary corporate culture known as the HP Way that CEO Mark Hurd has mastered, that's it. Known as a numbers guy who shirks the limelight, Hurd has practically channeled founding fathers Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett in his focus on how best to arm his 300,000-plus employees — and then get out of their way. No wonder, then, that HP's recent strategy to take on all comers has put some of its ...

Famously dubbed the "mad dog of the Middle East" by former President Ronald Reagan, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has a reputation that has run the gamut from eccentric revolutionary to international pariah over his long career. Often seen swathed in animal skins and surrounded by a posse of virgin female bodyguards, the colorful leader has become as well known for his unusual personality as for his controversial political moves, the latest of which included celebrating convicted ...