Special places archive
March 2002
Museum of Jurassic technology
This place in Los Angeles shows that museums don’t have to be irony-free zones, even in America. Here’s part of Ralf Rugoff’s description.
On entering its doors, visitors find themselves in a dimly lit maze of glass-and-wood vitrines that are reminiscent of an obscure 19th Century natural history museum, but for the fact that many displays feature state-of-the-art, viewer-activated technologies and multi-media dioramas. Their subjects embrace an equally uncertain terrain, ranging from oddities of natural history, like the display of a human horn, to unusual geological phenomena and antiquated technologies, such as the Boules of Conundrum, a device for fabricating man-made gems.
Many other people have been impressed—see my selected webliography of the Museum of Jurassic technology.
Document purporting to be a 1688 portrait of Mary Davis of Saughall in Cheshire, who had a horn growing on the back of her head [from the Museum of Jurassic technology web site]