Deutsches Museum, Munich

The Deutsches Museum is the substantial museum complex on Munich’s Museumsinsel, devoted to science and technology. Its purpose is to make scientific and technical knowledge vivid and understandable, using selected examples to connect discovery with changes in society and practical life. The institution began on 28 June 1903, following an initiative by electrical engineer Oskar von Miller.

The island itself had served as a rafting site since the Middle Ages, and the city made it available for the museum project in 1903. Look at the heavy structural surfaces of the main building: the collection building was constructed among the early large uses of reinforced concrete, deliberately turning an advanced building material into part of the demonstration. The museum’s scale reaches about 125,000 exhibited objects across 50 fields of science and technology.

Its Munich complex is also connected to branches in Bonn, Nuremberg, Oberschleißheim, and the city’s Verkehrszentrum. The story here is therefore not just a collection of objects. The building and the institution together present science as something made, tested, stored, explained, and continually developed.