Amos Rex

Amos Rex is Helsinki's most exciting contemporary art museum — an underground gallery beneath Lasipalatsi (Glass Palace) Square whose presence is announced by a series of domed skylights that bulge from the plaza surface like bubbles rising from the earth. The museum, opened in 2018, was designed by JKMM Architects, and the decision to build downward rather than upward — creating gallery space beneath a public square rather than displacing it with a building — is the kind of civic generosity that Helsinki does with quiet confidence.

The skylights are the museum's signature — convex glass domes that bring natural light into the underground galleries while creating a sculptural landscape on the plaza above. Children climb and slide on the domes, which is encouraged, and the sight of people playing on top of a museum while art is displayed beneath them captures something about Finland's relationship between culture and public space that is genuinely distinctive.

The exhibition programme focuses on immersive, large-scale installations and digital art — the teamLab exhibition that inaugurated the museum drew 270,000 visitors in three months, establishing Amos Rex as a destination for the kind of experiential contemporary art that traditional gallery spaces can't accommodate. The Lasipalatsi building above (a functionalist cinema and commercial building from 1936, recently restored) provides the museum's entrance, café, and the Bio Rex cinema that has been showing films on this site since the 1930s.