The museum's original location was a Neo-Gothic building on the Hansaring, built in 1900, but this was destroyed by bombs in 1943.

[1][2] The plain, red-brick Schwarz-Bernhard building stands on the site of a former Conventual monastery, whose shape is still traced by the ground plan and the square inner courtyard.

A low, modest antechamber leads into the museum's very large entrance hall and central staircase.

It features a thematic and chronological presentation of furniture, lamps, telephones, televisions, cameras, radios and household items, by designers including Ray Eames, Dieter Rams, Frank Lloyd Wright, Philippe Starck, Ettore Sottsass, and Joe Colombo.

These are exhibited alongside visual artworks by artists including Wassily Kandinsky, Victor Vasarely, Jesús Rafael Soto, Piet Mondrian and Günther Uecker, in order to show the historical relationships between art and design.