The museum building is located on Munich's Museum Island. On May 7, 1925, the new building was inaugurated together with the two Zeiss planetariums, the Copernican and the Ptolemaic. The collection building was the first of three complexes which comprise the museum and, are still in use today. 

In the early years, the exhibition and the collection of the Deutsches Museum were strongly influenced personally by Oskar von Miller. His ideas significantly determined the concept and design of the collections. He was also the one who strongly pushed for the museum's planetariums.