Deutsches Sport & Olympia Museum

This guide to the Deutsches Sport & Olympia Museum in Cologne starts with a small mystery: city records can't agree whether this old customs warehouse on the Rhine harbor was built in 1896 or 1898. It traces the building's decades as Zollhalle Ten, holding taxable cargo behind thick brick walls, and its transformation in the late 1990s when architect Walter von Lom cut a glass staircase and elevator through the old facade. It ends by asking what happens to a structure engineered to bear crates once its cargo-handling days are over.