Odysseum

This guide to Cologne's Odysseum traces the arc of a hands-on science museum built in two thousand nine over the bombed-out ruins of the old Chemische Fabrik Kalk, and its abrupt closure in twenty twenty-five. It follows the savings-bank foundation that ran it for sixteen years, the mounting subsidies that strained its finances, and the sale of the building in twenty twenty-one to a private buyer with an unusual connection to the museum itself. Pause outside its glass front and take in the fourteen future-themed zones that once filled it with about two hundred exhibits.