Museum of Applied Arts (MAKK)

The museum traces its origins to 1888, when citizens came together through the Kölnisches Kunstgewerbe-Verein (today the Overstolzengesellschaft) to establish a museum for applied arts. The founding collection was built around the holdings of scholars Ferdinand Franz Wallraf and Matthias Joseph de Noël, rapidly expanded through donations. A neo-Gothic building on Hansaplatz opened in 1900, its centrepiece the Pallenberg Hall — designed by Melchior Lechter and named after its donor, Jakob Pallenberg. The building was destroyed in the Second World War in 1943, though nearly the entire collection was saved. From 1961 to 1986, the holdings were housed in the Romanesque Overstolzenhaus on Rheingasse.

The three-storey, block-like structure is built from red brick with symmetrically arranged rectangular windows; parallel pitched roofs evoke historicising pointed gables. Its austerity was read as a twentieth-century response to the ideals of the medieval mendicant orders. The glazed north wall of the inner courtyard forms a display window into the museum, with a generous entrance hall beyond. After its opening the building was criticised for its "factory-like sobriety" and its large hall dismissed as wasted space. In retrospect it has come to be seen as a successful synthesis of the inherited and the newly created — celebrated as a "third way" between grand modernist gesture and mere restoration of the past.