After Hans Reitter's death in 1912, August Darapsky, a student of Theodor Curtius at Heidelberg University, accepted the chair in chemistry and chemical engineering of the Commercial College.

In 1919 the joint efforts of Cologne's Lord Mayor Konrad Adenauer and director of studies of the Commercial College, Christian Eckert, in convincing the Prussian government of permitting the establishment of a University in Cologne were successful. In 1920 the Faculty of Arts, which included the Chemical Institute, was constituted. In his education of chemistry students, Prof. Darapsky was at first only assisted by associate professor Hans Kesseler.

From 1924 on, not only "full chemists" but also prospective teachers, students with chemistry as minor subject and medical students carried out practical courses at the institute which by then had been enlarged to 81 work places. In order to ease the burden on Prof. Darapsky, the position of principal for the section of analytical and physical chemistry was established and filled by Prof. Robert Wintgen from Göttingen.

Until the end of 1924, 43 students having chemistry as major subject successfully obtained their doctorate. By now, Prof. Darapsky had to strongly advise against taking up chemistry as study subject due to overcrowding, and even the relocation of Prof. Wintgen and co-workers into the newly established Institute of Physical Chemistry and Colloidal Chemistry at the premises of the former elementary school at Severinswall 34-38 only brought temporary relief. Several memoranda and applications to the University's board of trustees chaired by Konrad Adenauer, in which Darapsky justified the necessity of a new building for the Chemical Institutes with overcrowding and constructional shortcomings of his institute's buildings, were unsuccessful.

As the lecture theatre was too small as well, Prof. Darapsky had to give his experimental lecture twice with a break of fifteen minutes. Only in 1935 conditions improved due to a decrease in the number of students and the institute's move into House II of Augusta Hospital, which had been reconstructed for these purposes, in Zülpicher Str. 47 (cf. picture). In doing so, it moved closer to the university's central building, which had been moved into in 1934, while the Institute of Physical Chemistry and Colloidal Chemistry remained at its premises in Severinswall.

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