The Wolfsonian–FIU

Not paintings. The Wolfsonian collects the designed objects of the industrial age, roughly 1850 to 1950, and it collects them because of what they were built to do.

Typical material includes propaganda posters and printed ephemera from across the political spectrum of the 1920s to 1940s; industrial and domestic design, from radio cabinets to kitchen appliances; furniture and interiors; world's fair and exposition material, which is where nations advertised themselves to each other; architectural models, drawings and salvaged fragments; and a substantial library of rare books and periodicals.

Exhibitions are usually thematic and argumentative rather than chronological surveys. A show might take a single idea — labour, speed, the machine, the nation — and follow it across countries and media. The captions do the heavy lifting and are worth reading.

Two practical notes. The galleries are compact and vertically arranged, so this is a ninety-minute museum rather than a half-day one. And it is genuinely not a children's museum: the subject matter includes the visual language of fascism and total war, presented as what it was.

If you have one indoor hour in South Beach and you want the one that changes how the street outside looks, it is this one rather than the art museum at the other end of the district. If you want contemporary art in a deco building, that is The Bass at 21st and Collins.

The Washington Storage Company opened in 1927, in the middle of the Florida land boom and a year after the hurricane that ended it. Robertson & Patterson designed it in Mediterranean Revival, the style that dominated South Florida before deco arrived: stucco walls, small deep-set windows, a tiled roofline and a heavily carved cast-stone surround around the entrance.

The function explains the form. This was a strongroom. Miami Beach in the 1920s was a winter resort, emptied every summer by heat and mosquitoes, and its seasonal residents needed somewhere secure and dry to leave the contents of a house. Small windows, thick walls and one ornamented door is exactly what that building looks like.

The conversion kept the shell and hollowed the inside. The entrance sequence retains the ornamental doorway and opens into a tall hall; galleries stack above it. Architectural fragments from the collection are installed in the public spaces, so the building itself carries part of the exhibition.

For anyone walking the district's architecture, this is the useful counterexample. The Art Deco Historic District is not uniformly deco. It holds Mediterranean Revival from the early and mid-1920s, deco and Streamline Moderne from the 1930s, and Miami Modern from the post-war years, all within the same twenty-odd blocks. The Wolfsonian is the clearest 1920s example you can go inside.