Your eyes meet the Wolfsonian, a museum that began as a storage facility and ended as one of the great repositories of propaganda design in the world. The building dates to 1927, when it served as the Washington Storage Company — a place where Miami Beach's wealthy seasonal residents could warehouse their furniture between visits. Its current incarnation as a museum is the project of Mitchell Wolfson Jr., a Miami Beach native and heir to a theater-chain fortune who spent decades collecting objects that reveal how design shapes political belief.
The collection contains more than 180,000 items: Italian Fascist posters, New Deal murals, Weimar German typography, American corporate streamlining. The argument of the collection is that the style of things — their colors, their fonts, the curve of a hood ornament — is never neutral. Wolfson donated the whole enterprise to Florida International University in 1997.
The building itself is a gem of Mediterranean Revival architecture: ornate ironwork, a monumental entrance, a lobby that feels like stepping into a Moorish dream. Walk in and notice the ironwork.