Willem van Aelst
Willem van Aelst was a Dutch Golden Age artist who specialized in still-life painting with flowers or game.
Wilson A. Bentley
The Snowflake Man s a biography of "Snowflake Bentley", the farmer from Jericho, Vermont, who pioneered the technique of photographing snowflakes and who then went on to take over 5000 photomicrographs of snowflakes, ice, dew, and frost. Although his photographs were taken between 1885 and 1931, they have never been equaled and are still much admired today.
World Centre of Communication
The World Centre of Communication is a project conceived by the sculptor Hendrik Christian Andersen and the architect Ernest Hébrard between 1901 and 1911. The project was presented in a volume published in 1913, titled Creation of a World Centre of Communication. The Centre has never been built: only urban projects, building drawings and a few sculptures do exist. What was the World Centre of Communication purpose? The authors aimed to gather in the Centre all the best intellectual product of mankind, both in the scientific and art field. In this ideal place, communication would have been at the service of the Good, Technological Progress and Civilisation. The Centre consisted of three areas: an Olympic Centre, an Art Centre and a Scientific Centre. The Olympic Centre would have contained a stadium, gyms, swimming pools, and at the entrance two giants statues of a man and a woman bearing a torch. The Art Centre would have housed a Temple of Art, galleries, libraries, schools, theatres, botanical gardens, and on both side two cathedrals. The Fountain of Life would have been located in the middle of the main square. The Scientific Centre, instead, would have been addressed to the Scientific Congress Building, the Temple of Religion and the Court of Justice. An imposing Tower of Progress completed the Centre with a huge transmitting antenna on its top and the Centre of World Press within, which had to broadcast the progresses of science.
Whole World Catalog
The Whole World Catalog was a how-to manual, a compendium, an enyclopedia, a literary review, an opinionated life guide, and a collection of readers' recommendations and reviews of everything from computational physics to goat husbandry.
Well of Saint Patrick
The bold scheme of St. Patrick Well consists of a circular shaft 200 feet deep and 45 feet wide lighted by 72-arched windows cut into the Pozzo di San Patrizio. Two spiral staircases descend from opposing doors of the shaft to access and transport water. Both stairs wind around each other, never meeting and resembling the structure of a DNA helix with 248 steps for each one. St. Patrick Well's ingenious design permitted mule-drawn carts carrying water bags to descend on one side of the double helix and ascend on the other end without ever colliding.
Wayang
Wayang is a form of puppet theatre art found in Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia, wherein a dramatic story is told through shadows thrown by puppets and sometimes combined with human characters. Its origins are traced to the spread of Hinduism in the medieval era and the arrival of leather-based puppet arts called Tholu bommalata from southern India.