A botanical garden, a photo exhibit titled My Golden Years and a tribute to Peruvian cultural heritage. And that’s just in the staircase leading to the Matthias K. Rath Museum of Destruction and Resurrection. Founded in October by seniors Nick Casey, Karan Mahajan and Ross Perlin, this museum has something else unusual about it: it’s in their dorm room.
The residents of Kairos 301 sought to create a Wunderkammer, modeled after the early German pre-museum that celebrated wonder. A shrine near the entrance pays tribute to the museum’s namesake, a European cardiologist and promoter of natural health therapy. The seniors offer regular tours of their museum, receiving nine to 12 visitors per day.
The hundreds of items on display range from the students’ summer travel treasures to relics of modern-day Stanford. The Micronesian Navigation Wall documents Casey’s study of ancient star navigation in the Pacific islands, and a billboard for Pulse hangs on another wall as a token of the former campus copy center, resurrected in January as FedEx/Kinko’s.
Living in a museum is not without sacrifice. Mahajan turned his closet into the museum library (catalogued according to Indian library scientist S.R. Ranganathan’s colon classification, naturally), and Perlin converted his desk into the official center for the interdisciplinary program for animal studies (which he plans to propose as a major).
The dorm room has become more than a Wunderkammer—it was the inspiration for Perlin and Casey’s winter-quarter student-initiated course, House of Wonder, in which students researched and promoted wonder tied to memory. But with graduation approaching, the museum’s future is uncertain. Casey takes a philosophical stance. “Most museums are meant to be permanent. . . . We’re the museum of destruction and resurrection. There’s a temptation to let this place disappear.”
