Best Dream Home

It's a favorite of hipsters, artists, scholars, scientists and pretty much anyone with an interest in natural history, dimly lit rooms, mysticism, bees, Wunderkammer, biology, archaeology, pyramids, taxidermy, Victoriana, the notion of what makes a museum a museum, and/or a general sort of elegant weirdness. The Museum of Jurassic Technology, which opened in the late 1980s and, along with its curator-creator David Wilson, was profiled in Lawrence Weschler's book Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonders, subsists on donations. It has survived some tough times, thanks in large part to the $500,000 MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant Wilson received in 2001. More recently, the museum picked up yet another prestigious accolade: its own Facebook page. Titled "I Want to Live in the Museum of Jurassic Technology," with some 134 members and growing, the page expresses a kind of deep longing. If you lived in the MJT, the sentiment goes, you would have as much time as you desired to wrap your mind around the enigma, to parse out every nuance as you contemplate its greatest hits: the mouse on toast; the Napoleon Library; the microminiature Goofy sculpture on a grain of rice atop the eye of a needle; the mobile-park dioramas; and the strange bell thing that chimes unexpectedly while you're staring at the holographic Egyptian tomb.

If you lived in the MJT, you would be the proud possessor of a wealth of relics, curios and technological artifacts supposedly harvested from the lower Jurassic period. People would squint for extended periods at the itty-bitty fruit-stone carving in your living room, trying to make out if there really is a Flemish landscape etched on its front, and "an unusually grim Crucifixion, with a soldier on horseback, Longinus piercing Christ's side with a lance" on its back. Friends would stop by for Georgian black tea and cookies in your Tula Tea Room. Perhaps they'd whisper about how you really ought to hire a new decorator, because your entire place is a wee bit funereal, never mind the cute portraits of the Soviet space dogs. Or if they straight up don't get it — and a few unenlightened folks never will — they'll stomp out in a bewildered huff and swear that it's the worst $10 donation they ever spent. You'll know better, though. "Jurassic" means a whole lot more than "dinosaur."—Gendy Alimurung