Photo: VTM/KKA, Petri Virtanen

Architecture

The building is designed by the American architect Steven Holl.

The main entrance near the statue of Marshal Mannerheim leads the visitor into a high lobby under a glass ceiling. This lends the building personality, which develops in increasingly clearer forms as one walks towards the auditorium and the galleries. A curving ramp leads from the ground-floor lobby towards the core of the museum in the distance. The design is based on ideas about the golden section, Zen-like peace, a human scale. These principles are manifested, for example, by the spatial sequences on the first and third floors, by the lines and details of the galleries. All services, from security and ventilation to exhibition technology, are concealed within the wall structures.

Fluorescent lamps in the galleries are installed in special 'light pockets', providing indirect, tranquil light for the galleries. In earlier times, lighting in art museums was expected to be uniform and static, but Kiasma has deliberately opted for a different solution. Because natural light changes depending on the direction it comes from, different galleries have different natural lighting conditions. The galleries can also be darkened.

The principle of simplicity is also manifest in the choice of materials. The walls are plastered white, the floors are tinted concrete without skirting boards. The walls of some galleries are curved or positioned obliquely, representing a conscious choice of searching for a challenge to the plurality of contemporary art. The yellow doors of the seminar room on the ground floor and the dark red used in the info desk and cloakroom provide splashes of colour.

The spaces of Kiasma are designed to embody a roughness that is typical of places where contemporary art best comes into its own. Features which develop naturally in old factories and warehouses have in Kiasma been given a new, deliberate form, expressing an austerity characteristic of working spaces.