The Museum of Modern Arts architecture and design department has decided to acquire the @ symbol, according to the New York Times. The typographic element joins a total collection of 175,000 items, with around 28,000 housed within the architecture and design department.

The department’s acquisitions committee selected the work for what Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at the museum, terms its “extraordinary elegance and economy.” It could be thought of a design equivalent of Marcel Duchamps readymades, which repurposed found objects, like a urinal or a shovel, as art works. Before Raymond Tomlinson used the @ symbol to send an email message in 1971, it had been used in accounting to signify a rate as shorthand for “at the rate of.” With a shift in context, a new piece of design was created.

The department decided simply to acquire the symbol, rather than a particular version of it, meaning it will enter the collection for free. The Times also points out that this is not the first time the museum has added an ephemeral work to its collection, though. In 2008, the museum acquired Tino Sehgals The Kiss, 2003, which consists of oral instructions to two performers to perform a series of motions, for $70,000. (It was recently loaned to the Guggenheim for its Tino Sehgal exhibition.)

In the architecture and design section, the humble @ symbol will sit alongside other seemingly commonplace objects that have achieved great things, like Gino Colombinis 1957 polyethylene kitchen pail, Reinhold Weisss 1961 chrome-plated toaster, and Ernö Rubiks eponymous cube, created in 1974.

Read more at the New York Times.