Earlier this week, thirty-three students from Florida International University’s School of Architecture came to the Wolfsonian museum and library for a tour of the facilities and a look at some of the 11,000 vintage postcards in our collection. Professors Claudia Busch, Eric Peterson, and Michelle Cintron brought their students over to the beach so that they could get an idea of exactly what would be involved in designing a museum that would have to house and exhibit a large postcard collection. After their tour of the gallery spaces, the students came down to the main reading room of our special collections and rare books library to view some of the more unusual postcards in our collection and to listen to and participate in a discussion about some of the less obvious environmental, storage, lighting, and other considerations that would be involved in designing a museum exclusively devoted to preserving and exhibiting vintage postcards in the subtropics. One important preservation and access idea that proved popular was the idea of digitizing and projecting images of postcards on the gallery walls to avoid exposing the fragile originals to damaging UV light. Since postcards were originally designed for travel, one of the professors suggested the possibility of creating a non-static display in which images of postcards might zip around the gallery spaces as if they were flying through post office sorting machines. All of us here at the Wolfsonian look forward to the students’ future research visits this semester and to seeing the final projects dreamed up by these budding architects.
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