PRECEDENT STUDIES

PRECEDENT STUDY: 01

3.1. Helsinki’s New Subterranean Art Museum Opens Its Doors:

The Amos Rex Museum is located beneath Lasipalatsi Finland, a 1930s shopping center known as the ‘Glass Palace’, containing five concrete windowed domes. The 23,500-squarefoot space was designed by Helsinki’s JKMM architecture firm(Nast, 2018). The structure boasts a maze of underground exhibition rooms none of which have pillars with skylights providing. Above ground, the skylights appear to be island-like mounds in the urban square, which passersby can climb onto for epic selfies. The skylights also have pipe-like windows that allow people aboveground to peer down into the exhibition space, sparking curiosity about the art that lies below. Lasipalatsi has been comprehensively refurbished as part of the project, with special care given to preserving original features that include the first external neon lighting in Finland. The project started in 2013 when the Figure

Amos Anderson Art Museum started searching for a new space. For decades, they’d been in a 1920s-era office tower whose dim lighting made it less than ideal for showing art and were looking to expand. They set their sights on the Bio Rex. Asmo Jaaksi, the leading architect at JKMM, came up with the idea to build the museum 20 feet under the square adjacent to the theater. Underground museums need more than just Figure they need to make a