In 2015 the MAK became the first museum to use bitcoin to acquire art, when it purchased the screensaver "Event listeners" of van den Dorpel.

At first, the school was housed in the former gun factory at Währinger Straße 11–13/Schwarzspanierstraße 17 (nowadays the Anatomical Institute of the Medical University of Vienna which was newly constructed in 1886).

Only after the construction of an extension next to the Imperial Royal Austrian Museum of Art and Industry, did the school move to Stubenring 3 in 1877.

The subsequent rearrangement of the furniture and the extraordinary clock collection in the rooms of the Geymüllerschlössel have provided visitors with an authentic insight into the diversity of Biedermeier interior decorating until today.

[5] The Arenbergpark Flak Tower—one of the six flak towers erected in Vienna during World War II—became an additional branch of the museum in 1994 and since 1995 has served as the MAK Contemporary Art Depot (MAK Tower), which hosts major parts of the Contemporary Art Collection of the museum.

The focus is on new trends and interdisciplinary developments in the fields of fine arts and architecture which are expedited through scholarships and projects and are expanded through temporary exhibitions.

It lasted from 11 June to 4 October 2015 and was initiated by the MAK in partnership with the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Kunsthalle Wien, the Architekturzentrum Wien, and the Vienna Business Agency, creative center departure, and organized with support from the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology as a non-university research partner.

Laufberger's cartoons were lost, and so around 1893 the mural painting of the figures on the outer façade were recreated by students of Karl Karger of the School of Applied Arts.

In 1875 the Austrian Museum was joined by an adjacent new building for the School of Applied Arts at Stubenring 3, whose plans were also drawn up by Heinrich von Ferstel.

In 1989, a complete renovation of the museum's old buildings and construction of both a two-story underground depot and a connecting wing by with a generous storage facility and additional exhibition space began.

Its showrooms were designed by artists such as Barbara Bloom, Eichinger or Knechtl, Günther Förg, Gangart, Franz Graf, Jenny Holzer, Donald Judd, Peter Noever, Manfred Wakolbinger and Heimo Zobernig.

The building in the Weiskirchnerstraße is reserved for temporary exhibitions, while the rooms at Stubenring host the permanent collections and the MAK DESIGN LAB.

[17] Highlights of the collection are the holdings of the Wiener Werkstätte, chairs by Thonet and Kohn, furniture by Danhauser, Gustav Klimt's cartoons for the Mosaic Frieze of Stoclet Palace, Du Paquier's Porcelain Cabinet chamber from Dubsky Palace, a collection of Bohemian and Venetian glass, Flemish and Italian lace, silver, porcelain and carpets as well as Chinese porcelain, Japanese colored woodcuts (Ukiyo-e) and Japanese printing stencils (Katagami).

Interactive thematic areas form an illustrative course on areas such as cooking (including a replica of Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky's Frankfurt kitchen), eating and drinking, sitting, artistic, industrial and alternative production, transporting, communicating and ornament, and the Helmut Lang Archive, which shows the artistic highlights with selected designs.

[19] The newly created passageways and modular units lead to a connecting spatial experience and allow rapid adaptation to changing requirements.

The MAK Forum forms a flexibly usable space, which is used as a meeting place as well as an experimental area for exhibitions and mediation formats.

Data on the collection or the in-house publications are released for research and formats such as the MAK-Digistories or the MAK-Blog provide information on a wide variety of topics.

Since May 2017, the MAK with its collection highlights can also be visited virtually on Google Arts & Culture:[21][22] Gigapixel images of Gustav Klimt's design drawings for the execution of a frieze in the dining room of the Stoclet Palace in Brussels (1910–1911) can be seen as well as parts of the heroic epic Hamzanama, which is one of the major works of painting in the Islamic world.