MAK – Museum of Applied Arts

The MAK was the first museum of its kind on the continent, and it was founded to improve manufacturing.

It was established on 7 March 1863 as the Imperial Royal Austrian Museum of Art and Industry, under Franz Joseph I, and opened to the public on 12 May 1864 in the Ballhaus near the Hofburg.

Heinrich von Ferstel's neo-Renaissance building at Stubenring 5 opened on 15 November 1871 — the first museum building on the Ringstrasse. An extension followed at Weiskirchnerstraße 3 in 1908 and a major renovation was completed in 1993.

James Turrell's permanent installation MAKlite has lit the façade since 2004.

The Wiener Werkstätte, Thonet chairs, and Klimt's working drawings.

Gustav Klimt's cartoons for the Stoclet Palace frieze are here — the full-size working drawings for a mosaic in Brussels that most people will never see, which makes these the closest thing to it.

The Wiener Werkstätte holdings are the reference collection for Viennese design between 1903 and 1932. The Thonet bentwood furniture, the Japanese woodblock prints, the carpets and the Chinese porcelain are each substantial in their own right.

More than 300,000 objects are published online, the largest online collection among the Austrian federal museums.

In 2015 the MAK became the first museum to buy art with bitcoin.

Two hours.

The permanent galleries were redesigned so that a different contemporary artist staged each room, which means the display itself is an exhibit and the rooms do not resemble one another. That is either the best or the most irritating thing about the museum.

The Klimt drawings and the Wiener Werkstätte rooms are the hour that matters.

The Stadtpark is across the Ring and the Postsparkasse, Otto Wagner's masterpiece, is two minutes north.

Anyone following Viennese design through the city should treat the MAK, the Postsparkasse and the Secession as one route; they are the three buildings that argue with each other.

The late-opening evening, when admission has traditionally been reduced or free.

That arrangement is the museum's own and changes; it is worth checking rather than assuming.

The museum closes one day a week.

The galleries are artificially lit and the season makes no difference to what can be seen, which is not true of most Vienna museums.

It is one of the quieter major museums in the city at any hour, and never has the queues the Ring's larger institutions do.

The MAK is ticketed, and has long run a reduced or free evening on one day of the week. Current rates and the current arrangement are not published on the sources this page uses and are not reproduced here.

The MAK Tower in the Arenbergpark, a Second World War flak tower holding part of the contemporary collection, is a separate site with its own limited opening.

Combined tickets across the MAK sites are sold.

The 1st district, at Stubenring 5, on the Ring at the eastern side of the Innere Stadt.

Stubentor on U-Bahn line U3 is at the door and Landstraße on the U3 and U4 is five minutes south. The Ring trams 1 and 2 stop outside.

The U-Bahn has five lines and 109 stations over 83.9 km, running from about 05:00 to 01:00 and all night at weekends.

The artist-staged permanent rooms are deliberately unconventional and some of them show objects in ways that make individual pieces hard to see. This is the museum's policy rather than an accident.

The Klimt Stoclet drawings are fragile works on paper and are not always on display.

The museum closes one day a week and the reduced-price evening arrangement changes.

The MAK Tower in the Arenbergpark is a separate building across the canal with very limited opening.

Photography rules vary by room and by exhibition.

The reading room and the Ferstel staircase are the best interiors and are the pictures that read as a nineteenth-century museum.

The artist-staged galleries photograph as installations rather than as collections, which is either the point or the problem depending on what the photograph is for.

The Thonet chairs, hung in rows against light walls, are the most photogenic objects in the building.

Turrell's MAKlite changes the façade colour after dark and is the reason to walk past at night.