Ethereal underworld: exploring Helsinki’s colossal new art bunker | Art and design | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/aug/27/helsinki-amos-rex-art-museum
In a vast expanse beneath the Finnish capital lies a soaring circus-top culture hub. Will the €50m Amos Rex art museum put the city at the forefront of Europe’s art scene?
Oliver Wainwright
Oliver Wainwright in Helsinki
Mon 27 Aug 2018 08.00 BST
Bulging white mounds rear up out of the ground in the middle of Helsinki, tapering to circular windows that point like cyclopean eyes around the square. Children scramble up the steep slopes while a skateboarder attempts to glide down one, past a couple posing for a selfie at the summit.
This curious landscape of humps and funnels signals the arrival of Amos Rex, a €50m (£45m) art museum for the Finnish capital, which opens this week in a vast subterranean space that was once a bus station parking lot.
“It is as if the museum didn’t quite agree to go underground,” says Asmo Jaaksi of local architecture firm JKMM, which masterminded the project, “and it’s somehow bubbling up into the square.”
