On West 53rd Street, in the heart of Manhattan, next door to the American Folk Art Museum and footsteps away from Rockefeller Center, Radio City and other New York City attractions looms the Museum of Modern Art. MoMA, as the museum is fondly known, is a popular tourist destination where people flock to see the very best of modern art that the world has to offer.

And the art on display comes in many guises. Take, for example, the museum’s architecture and design galleries, established in 1932 to celebrate what it terms “these allied and interdependent arts.” The collection houses a wide array of objects, stretching from a watering can from the 1800s to a mould for a rubber balloon from the mid 1900s to a conference telephone prototype created in this century. But a clear favourite is Swedish Sven Wingquist’s invention of the “self-aligning ball bearing” from 1907, which led to the foundation of SKF. The bearing became part of the collection in 1934.

“Both efficient and pleasing to the eye, the self-aligning ball bearing can be seen as an emblem of the machine age — a name often used to define the 1920s and 1930s, when industrial designers as well as consumers took a new interest in the look and style of commercial products,” the museum states. “Even parts of machines could be appreciated for their beauty, which came from the purity of abstract geometry. Good design was considered by modernists as essential to the elevation of society.”

Because Wingquist’s self-aligning ball bearing is so popular, a replica of it is available for purchase across the street in the MoMA Design Store as a paperweight.

The self-aligning ball bearing paperweight, 100 mm in outside diameter, is in chrome-plated steel and has a MoMA logo etched on the inner ring.

“The paperweights are a popular holiday gift,” says store manager Jessica Sebastian.