All photos of Etelaranta 6, Museum of Architecture Helsinki are by Studio Mikko Ryhanen.

Architecture, Interiors.. Architecture & Design Museum Helsinki has a new address, and it comes with a story worth telling. Eteläranta 6 is the museum’s temporary outpost in a historic South Harbour building, opened during Helsinki Design Week as a space for encounters, dialogue and experimentation — and, handily, it looks straight out onto the plot where the museum’s permanent home, designed by JKMM Architects, is due to land in 2030.

• RELATED STORIES: Read more about Helsinki Design Week on Archipanic.

“Eteläranta 6 gives us a unique opportunity to engage the public in a dialogue about the development of both the museum and urban culture. This is invaluable to us as we move towards the new museum,” says Pilvi Kalhama, the museum’s director. The building itself is no blank slate: a Jugend (Finnish Art Nouveau) structure by architect Mauritz Gripenberg, completed in 1904.

For the interior, Studio Joanna Laajisto took a light-touch approach — preservation over intervention, reuse over replacement. Wear marks and quirks once filed under ‘imperfection’ have been left in plain sight.

Each of Eteläranta 6‘s three floors has its own mood: a soft-toned event and exhibition space on the ground floor, a dark, intimate library one flight up, and bright workshop and meeting rooms higher still.

Nearly everything inside has been reused, with furniture by major Finnish design names drawn from the museum’s own study collection, alongside new bespoke pieces by Laajisto, built from materials salvaged from the former Museum of Finnish Architecture.

Pallasmaa Reference Library.

Collection Specialist and Exhibition Curator Harry Kivilinna has pulled highlights for display, including glass by Gunnel Nyman, Timo Sarpaneva, Tapio Wirkkala and Nanny Still, and ceramics by Rut Bryk, Kyllikki Salmenhaara and A. W. Finch.

Pallasmaa Reference Library.

Upstairs, architect and theorist Juhani Pallasmaa has helped curate a reference library at Eteläranta 6 drawn from his own collection — roughly a tenth of the 12,000 volumes he previously donated to the museum — anchored by a 1947 Paavo Tynell ceiling light, originally made for Arabia’s factory building.

Pallasmaa Reference Library.

This autumn, Eteläranta 6 turns over its upper floors to an Open Podcast Studio and a workspace for communities, plus a Community Residency offering free space to Helsinki-based collectives and working groups, with public workshops and talks folded in along the way.

Pallasmaa Reference Library.

All of this is a warm-up act. The permanent museum, designed by JKMM Architects after an anonymous international competition, opens in South Harbour in 2030 — one of Finland’s most ambitious cultural builds in years.

All following photos of the new Architecture and Design Museum Hesinki are ©JKMM Architects.

Renders show a geometric form wrapped around a triangular atrium, triangular windows cut into sloped recycled-brick façades, and a design library. An outdoor terrace will wrap the upper level. At Eteläranta 6, visitors can find out more about the project through a scale model and a 3D experience.

The project rises, fittingly, on the site once earmarked for Helsinki’s Guggenheim project, which the Finnish government scrapped in 2016 [Find out more]. In June 2025, the implementation of the new Museum of Architecture and Design was made legally binding. Until completion, due in 2030, the museum keeps its doors open at Korkeavuorenkatu 23 — with Eteläranta 6 as the place to watch the story unfold.

Photos and renders are by Studio Mikko Ryhanen or JKMM Architects.

• RELATED STORIES: Discover more Finnish architecture and design on Archipanic.