TUM Architecture Museum

Germany's largest architecture collection

The Architecture Museum of the Technical University of Munich holds Germany's most extensive architecture collection: around 500,000 drawings and plans, some 100,000 photographs and models from the 18th century to the present. It is one of the four institutions under the roof of the Pinakothek der Moderne — alongside the Modern Art Collection, the State Graphic Collection and Die Neue Sammlung (design).

Unlike a museum with a fixed permanent display, it sees itself as an archive with an exhibition programme: drawing on its holdings, it curates several major, internationally noted temporary shows each year on architectural history and present-day questions of building.

From teaching collection to museum

Its roots go back to 1868, when a teaching collection for architectural education was set up at the New Polytechnic School — the predecessor of TU Munich. In 1912 the collection was given a representative suite of rooms in Friedrich von Thiersch's new university building on Gabelsbergerstraße. During the 1920s and 1930s it gradually changed from a collection of models into a scholarly architecture archive; timely relocation saved the holdings from destruction in the Second World War.

From 1975 the specialist collection was systematically turned into an archive with museum functions. Winfried Nerdinger, professor of architectural history at TUM from 1986, was appointed the first director of the "Architecture Museum of TU Munich" in 1988 and earned it international recognition through numerous exhibitions. With the opening of the Pinakothek der Moderne in September 2002, the museum gained its own galleries in the Kunstareal. Since Nerdinger's retirement, Andres Lepik has directed the museum (since 2012).

Visiting in the Kunstareal

The Architecture Museum shows its exhibitions in the Pinakothek der Moderne, Barer Straße 40, in the heart of Maxvorstadt's museum quarter. How the museum frames the architecture of the past two centuries pairs well with our architecture chapter, which sorts the quarter's buildings by era.