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Wunderkammer: A Room of Wonders

Wunderkammer: A Room of Wonders

[info]cottontimer
10/31/05 01:19 pm
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Jacob the Cat

Rosamond Purcell's full-size re-creation of
17th century naturalist Olaus Worm's "Wunderkammer".


The wunderkammer idea came about in a world before museums. Before there were cameras to capture the quirks, strangeness, and charm of the world, people would collect and display natural and manmade oddities in their homes, sometimes devoting entire rooms to their collections. Imagine shells, eggs, taxidermied birds and animals, travel souvenirs, and anything strangely shaped (a vegetable with a face? Yes, please!) arranged in tableaux to underscore their extraordinariness.

~Vogue, October 2005

Not being much of a collector and not having much space to display anything, I've never had a wunderkammer aka "room of wonders" or "cabinet of curiosities". [info]lizardek keeps a small shadowbox that could double as a miniature wunderkammer. And my dad loves to collect curios that dangle from ceiling beams and lounge on every flat surface.

...initially, these universes in miniature were private pleasures, invitations to escape, to dream, to reflect on nature and our place in it.

When we finally settle down in our Singapore home, I may start one or two wunderkammers of my own. Perhaps with a window, book, or genetics theme.

"To build a wunderkammer, you need ingenuity, innocence, and eyes that go 360 degrees," says Kean Etro. ...You don't have to go out and actually scour the globe for reason-challenging bits and pieces.

What kind of wunderkammer would you create?


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  • [info]smittenbyu
    10/31/05 11:50 am (UTC)
    I am not much of a collector of anything... unless you count photos! My sis on the other hand is the collector of everything! Just open the door to her room and it's a wunderkammer! :P

  • [info]qadira
    10/31/05 03:54 pm (UTC)
    Over time, I think all the rooms in my home would be a collage. I'd prefer any knick-knacks to be in shelves or cabinets with glass doors though, so I wouldn't have to dust them endlessly. Turning my yard into something with bits of hills, patio nooks, water features, lots of plants, little shrines & grottos, and no grass lawn, would be something else fun. Maybe fun to have, rather than fun to do. That would be a lot of work to get it like that. lol.

    :)

    • [info]cottontimer
      11/1/05 10:44 am (UTC)
      Sounds like you'd like my parents' house! It's exactly how you describe it minus the cabinets with glass doors. :)

      • [info]qadira
        11/1/05 04:17 pm (UTC)
        Friends of ours have the grass-less yard with water features et. They live in Portland though, so their climate is more conducive to things like rose gardens and interesting mosses. :)

        I probably would love your parent's house.

        There's also the side of me that likes the spare clean lines of architecture like your home in Singapore. But while I like that look, I tend towards too much entropy to live in it successfully. lol

        • [info]cottontimer
          11/1/05 04:25 pm (UTC)
          Our place in Singapore is still spare clean lines because we're not actually living there yet!

  • [info]lizardek
    10/31/05 09:20 pm (UTC)
    Oh!! I LOVE IT!!!
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