Architecture and Design Museum

About 75,000 objects, 350,000 photographs, 555,000 drawings and 800 architectural scale models, covering roughly 5,500 Finnish designers and architects from the Art Nouveau furniture and ceramics that opened the old Museum of Applied Arts, through Alvar Aalto's architecture and furniture, Marimekko's and Maija Isola's textiles and Arabia's ceramics, to Olof Backstrom's Fiskars scissors and the drawings, models and photographs inherited from the former Museum of Finnish Architecture. Most of it is currently in store rather than on display, pending a new collections exhibition due in spring 2027.

This institution's own account of its founding is painted on its gallery wall: the industrial exhibitions of the mid-19th century, and Sir Henry Cole's South Kensington Museum in London, persuaded reformers across Europe that a museum of applied art could raise the standard of mass-produced goods. Finland's version, the Museum of Applied Arts (Taideteollisuusmuseo), traces its own founding collection to the 1873 Vienna World Exhibition. It renamed itself Designmuseo, Design Museum, in 2002, on the grounds that the old name was too long and complicated.

A second institution grew up alongside it. The Museum of Finnish Architecture was founded in 1956 from a photographic collection assembled since 1949 by the Finnish Association of Architects, making it the second-oldest architecture museum in the world after Moscow's Shchusev Museum. It spent most of its life in its own neoclassical building on Kasarmikatu, a few minutes from the Design Museum, designed by Magnus Schjerfbeck in 1899 for a scientific society and later the University of Helsinki.

In January 2024 the two merged into the Architecture and Design Museum (Arkkitehtuuri- ja designmuseo), under a Foundation for the Finnish Museum of Architecture and Design formed in 2022 and an operating company, AD Museum Ltd. By September 2025 the two collections' operations had been consolidated onto this single site, ending the Museum of Finnish Architecture's own address after nearly 45 years. A separate Wikidata entry (Q78724098) exists for the future building described below; it is a proposed structure, not yet built, and should not be confused with the institution and building described on this page, which is what a visitor can walk into today.

The museum occupies a red-brick, neo-Gothic building designed by the architect Gustaf Nystrom and completed in 1894-1895, with steep gables and a tall central spire flanked by smaller turrets. It was built as Laroverket for gossar och flickor, a Swedish-language school for boys and girls, and served as a school until 1977 before opening as a museum in 1978. The building is owned by the Finnish state through Senate Properties and is protected as heritage.

The square in front of it, Koulupuistikko, is under construction from 3 August to 16 December 2026; the museum states that both its main entrance and its accessible courtyard entrance stay in normal use throughout. The narrower effect is on transport: the Johanneksenkirkko tram stop, directly outside the main door, is out of service from 31 August to 30 September 2026 along with the Kolmikulma and Tarkkampujankatu stops, and tram 10B calls instead at Kolmikulma, about 300 metres away, until the works are done.

As of this research, the museum is showing three exhibitions and nothing else. The ground floor carries Aalto Design - Shapes of Wellbeing (5 June 2026 - 6 January 2027), reading Aino, Alvar and Elissa Aalto's work through the idea of wellbeing, with furniture, glass, drawings and architectural models, a contemplative side room designed by Linda Bergroth called the Aalto Lounge, and a 2025 video installation by Ilona Sagar on the Paimio Sanatorium. The top floor holds Escape to Moominvalley (10 October 2025 - 6 January 2027), which starts from Tove Jansson's own studio and her island of Klovharun before opening into a built Moominvalley, with an audio guide narrated by Jani Toivola. The basement carries the museum's changing slot, currently Juha Vehmaanpera: Craft Punk (20 February 2026 - 6 January 2027), a contemporary craft and costume show that reviewers describe as the most divisive of the three.

What is not there matters as much as what is. Utopia Now, the collection exhibition that had told the story of Finnish design from 1870 to the present since 2017, closed on 12 April 2026. The museum's own account calls it much-loved and says it challenged as well as celebrated the national design story. Its replacement is not due to open until spring 2027, so for most of 2026 a visit here is three temporary shows rather than a survey of the museum's own collection, a gap several visitors note with disappointment.

The museum's holdings, shared between the two merged institutions, run to about 75,000 objects, 350,000 photographs, 555,000 drawings and 800 architectural scale models, documenting roughly 5,500 Finnish designers and architects. Past displays have included Valter Jung's carved 1903 cabinet and matching Art Nouveau furniture from the museum's historical gallery; faience vases in Arabia's geometric Fennia pattern (1902-1920) from Finland's leading ceramics factory; Rut Bryk's mosaic panel of stylised birds; and, from the wider Nordic ceramics holdings rather than the Finnish canon specifically, a Spektralov-pattern vase by the Swedish designer Stig Lindberg for Gustavsberg.

The single most-owned object with roots here is Olof Backstrom's 1967 orange-handled scissors for Fiskars, a design essentially unchanged in more than half a century and sold well over a billion times worldwide; the museum gave it its own 50th-anniversary exhibition in 2017, and an example sits in the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection in New York. Textile design by Maija Isola for Marimekko is named among the collection's particular strengths alongside the Aaltos, Eero Aarnio, the Saarinen family and the lighting designer Paavo Tynell. Access to the physical collection for research or loans is currently suspended while the museum moves and renovates; requests are being taken for 2028, with digital materials the main resource until then.

A dedicated new building, called Kumma (Finnish for peculiar, or curious), is planned for the Makasiiniranta site on Helsinki's South Harbour waterfront, the same plot the city council rejected in 2016 for a proposed Guggenheim Helsinki. The design, by JKMM Architects (also responsible for the Amos Rex art museum and the Helsinki Dance House), won an international, anonymous, two-stage competition that drew 624 entries; the jury's decision was unanimous. The project is budgeted at around 105 million euros, funded by the Finnish state, the City of Helsinki and private foundations including the Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation, the Finnish Cultural Foundation and Svenska kulturfonden. Construction is targeted to begin by the end of 2027, with the building opening in 2030.

The jury's own record of the process is not simply congratulatory. In the first stage it judged the Kumma design closed and heavy, with facades that lacked openness and a lobby short of daylight; the revised second-stage entry answered some of that, with softened facades and new openings, but the jury still flagged that the sharp corners, the monumental staircase and the triangular geometry raised concerns about usability and accessibility that remain to be resolved before the building is built. Until 2030 at the earliest, the building on Korkeavuorenkatu described on this page is the only Architecture and Design Museum a visitor can walk into.

Visitors consistently praise the 1894 building itself and its central setting opposite Johannes Church, and respond well to whichever of the current temporary exhibitions they came for, especially Aalto Design and Escape to Moominvalley; several are pleasantly surprised to learn how many everyday objects, from Fiskars' orange scissors to the Aalto vase, started here. The recurring complaint is value: at 23 euros for an adult, a visit that several people finish inside an hour, with no encyclopedic survey of Finnish design currently on view, reads as expensive for what is on show, and more than one visitor arrived expecting the long-running permanent collection exhibition and found it already closed.