Architecture & Design Museum Helsinki

One institution with a changing home

The Museum of Finnish Architecture and the Design Museum merged in 2024. Their current public programme is centred on Korkeavuorenkatu, the former Design Museum address.

Older guides describing two separate visits can send you to the wrong building.

The new waterfront museum is planned for 2030. Until then, the existing building remains the place to check for exhibitions.

The merger makes this an especially useful stop for thinking across scales, from the object held in a hand to the room or city in which it is used.

Aalto beyond the famous chair

Aalto Design: Shapes of Wellbeing, listed through 6 January 2027, considers the work of Alvar, Aino and Elissa Aalto together. Drawings and models sit alongside furniture, glass, material experiments and art, placing the familiar objects within a broader approach to living.

The exhibition’s central idea is that wellbeing involves relationships between people, materials, buildings and nature. Compare a piece of furniture with an architectural drawing rather than treating one as a souvenir of the other.

Both can reveal decisions about how a person rests, moves or encounters light.

Body and building

Ilona Sagar’s multichannel video installation Other Actors connects the human body with the Paimio Sanatorium and its architecture. It gives the exhibition a contemporary voice, rather than leaving wellbeing as a historical claim attached to modernist classics.

The Aalto Lounge, designed by Linda Bergroth, adds a place for rest and reflection among original Aalto objects. Its purpose is experiential, but follow the room’s instructions about what is available to use: an exhibition about comfortable furniture does not make every displayed chair a seat.

Craft that resists haste

Juha Vehmaanperä’s Craft Punk provides a different approach to design. The knitting artist brings handcraft, slow fashion, queer theory and do-it-yourself culture into the museum.

The presentation includes recent works, experiments with materials and projects developed through communal making.

Look at the density and construction of the textile work as well as its outline. Knitting records repeated actions, and its labour is part of the meaning here.

This is a useful counterpoint to seeing design only as a polished industrial product bearing a celebrated name.

Choose by the current programme

This museum is in transition, so a dated exhibition list is more useful than an undated catalogue of Finnish design icons. The Designed & Loved concept will change the existing house in spring 2027.

Its new collection display will bring architecture and design together, and the ground floor is planned to become admission-free. The closure and reopening dates belong in your travel plan as well as the exhibition calendar.

Pair the museum with time in the surrounding Design District if you want to continue thinking about objects in use. Shops and showrooms are separate businesses with their own hours, and no purchase is needed to make sense of the museum visit.