Helsinki Unveils an Exciting New Design Museum—Located Underground

Visitors that stroll through the Lasipalatsi Square in Helsinki are likely to find a new addition: five concrete windowed domes. This isn’t an art installation, though it very well could be. It’s part of the new Amos Rex museum, which opens in the Finnish capital on August 30. The new 23,500-square-foot space was designed by Helsinki’s JKMM architecture firm. The $57 million structure boasts a maze of underground exhibition rooms—none of which have pillars—with skylights providing serious wow factor. Above ground, the skylights appear to be island-like mounds in the urban square, which passersby can climb onto for epic selfies. The skylights also have pipe-like windows that allow people aboveground to peer down into the exhibition space, sparking curiosity about the art that lies below.

The project started in 2013, when the Amos Anderson Art Museum started searching for a new space. For decades, they’d been in a 1920s-era office tower (whose dim lighting made it less than ideal for showing art) and were looking to expand. They set their sights on the Bio Rex (or Rex Cinema in English)—Helsinki’s iconic modernist film theater, which was first built in 1936 to host the Helsinki Olympics. But the theater itself was too small to host a sprawling contemporary art museum, so Asmo Jaaksi, the leading architect at JKMM, came up with the idea to build the museum 20 feet under the square adjacent to the theater. “The only free space was this open square,” said Jaaksi last week in a walk through the museum. “Building underground was the only option, but I think it works quite well because the exhibitions have natural light.”

Underground museums need more than just windows for daylight; they need to make a statement aboveground so they don’t go unnoticed. “The biggest challenge was how to make it visible in the cityscape,” said Jaaksi. “We wanted to have the square open but still draw people from aboveground to underground, so we came up with these domed forms, which try to be unto the building but not obtrusive.”

The construction team had to dig out 460,000 cubic feet of rock for the new museum. In the weeks leading up to the museum opening, locals peered down into the exhibition space while using their hands to block out the summer sun, trying to catch a better glimpse.

Amos Rex’s opening exhibition is not of Nordic art, but rather a solo show called “Massless” by Japanese art collective teamLab, known for creating interactive installations. However, this museum is an addition to Helsinki’s cultural quarter, which boasts a number of museums within walking distance, including the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, the National Museum of Finland, and the Helsinki Art Museum. The Central Library Oodi by JKMM is expected to be completed this winter. “By adding a bold new layer to the Lasipalatsi, we feel we are connecting past with present,” said Jaaksi. “We would like this to come across as a seamless extension, as well as an exciting museum space very much of its time.”