Turku Museum of History and the Future

Introduction

The architectural design is an exploration of our historic spatial relationship to time within different cultures. Language is intrinsic to our understanding of time & space, history and the future. Many languages consider the future is in front and the past as behind, a nuance in Finnish being the future can be said to be in the East/sunrise, and the past is the West/sunset. This manifests within the visitor experience as a key navigational axis running from the west to east, sunset to sunrise, from the past to the future. The shimmering materiality of the building explores a historical understanding of time in relation to the environment, the changing of seasons and the annual cycles of the sun. It acts as a marker of environmental time constantly adapting and reflecting the large variations of sunlight throughout the day and throughout the year. The structure of the building is an exploration in material time with a contrasting palette of ancient and futuristic construction methods and materials. Stone is used to represent slow ancient time, timber as a steady, organic time and aluminium as a symbol of manufactured, cyclical time. The architectural plan has been formulated to balance flexibility and pragmatism with character and idiosyncrasy. Whilst the overall building is conceived with sustainable practices and future proofed design at its core.