Who built it
The building is the work of three architects in partnership, not one. Older accounts credit Eliel Saarinen alone, because he is the name that later became famous abroad, but the design was by the office of Herman Gesellius, Armas Lindgren and Eliel Saarinen, which was the leading practice in Finland at the time. They won the competition in 1902; the partnership broke up in 1905, and it was Lindgren who finalised the plans.
Construction ran from 1905 to 1910, and the interiors and displays took so long that the museum did not open to the public until 1916 — the year before Finnish independence, in a building conceived to argue for it.
The style is National Romantic, with Art Nouveau in the detail: a granite exterior, a tall tower, and carving drawn from Finnish folklore. The idea was that a young nation should have a museum that looked like nowhere else, and the plan carries it through indoors as well — each department was given its own architectural character, so that the church art is housed in something resembling a medieval Finnish stone church. A stone bear sits in front of the tower, and the entrance hall is painted with scenes from the Kalevala, the national epic.
The Kalevala, and the Tolkien connection stated properly
Older accounts gesture at a link between Finland's national epic and The Lord of the Rings by saying the two authors drew on similar sources. That is not what happened, and the real version is more interesting.
Tolkien read the Kalevala itself, taught himself Finnish in order to read it, and said so repeatedly; his early tale of Kullervo is a direct reworking of one of its stories. More than that, he built the phonology of Quenya, the high-elven language, on Finnish — the sound of it is deliberately Finnish rather than accidentally similar. The Kalevala was assembled from oral poetry collected in Karelia by Elias Lönnrot and published in the nineteenth century, and it did as much as anything to make a Finnish national identity possible.
What is being built
Two projects ran at once, and between them they roughly remake the institution.
- The extension, by JKMM, who won an open competition in 2019. It is almost entirely underground — two levels below the courtyard, with only a small fraction of its floor area above ground. What shows is a bowl-shaped restaurant pavilion in the courtyard, which also becomes the new entrance. The foundation stone was laid in May 2024 and the building was handed over to the museum in June 2026.
- The renovation of the old building, which includes roofing over one of its courtyards in glass. The public rooms have been overhauled throughout.
The three permanent exhibitions telling the history of Finland, shown from 2017 until the closure, return in revised form when the museum opens. The restaurant, shops and schools programme start again at the same time.
What to do instead, until spring 2027
The National Museum is part of a group of sites, several of which are open, and the collections it holds are not the only place to find this material.
- Seurasaari open-air museum, on an island reached by a footbridge from Meilahti — farm buildings and houses moved here from around the country. Summer only.
- The Ateneum, the national gallery of older Finnish art, which reopened in April 2023 with its collection rehung by theme rather than chronology. The Kalevala paintings that most people are looking for are here rather than at the National Museum.
- Helsinki City Museum, beside Senate Square, which covers the city rather than the country.
- Suomenlinna, where the Suomenlinna Museum is open all year and covers two and a half centuries of the fortress.