Customise your museum experience

This cultural exploration takes you round the unique architecture and living solutions in Tapiola. Come and experience some of the features of a modern garden city that helped make Finnish urban design globally recognised. See the landmarks of Tapiola’s centre and walk past rows of experimental terraced houses.

You can pick and mix workshops and guided tours offered by KAMU, Espoo City Museum, to tailor the perfect day out for your work community. Choose workshops that inspire you, where you can design a whole new neighbourhood, be the architects of your own lives and build your dream home. Or, if you would prefer to spend the day outdoors, choose guided or independent cultural walks that will introduce you to Tapiola’s architecture. Finally, a delicious lunch or dinner in a quality restaurant will provide a perfect end to the day.

Participants will study the cultural landscape of Espoo and make their own Espoo postcards.

In this small-group workshop, the participants will design a 1950s neighbourhood in Espoo, offering its residents a good life, and learn about the origins of the city’s green suburbia. 

The tour takes you from the metro to the Exhibition Centre WeeGee or from WeeGee to the metro. Aarne Ervi’s early 1960s centre, ‘The City’, was presented to visitors as the highlight of modern Finnish architecture: Terraced houses and blocks of flats that blended in with their surroundings, ‘the bachelors’ hotel’ Mäntytorni, ‘The Tractor Factory’ prefab building and the heart of the village, Kino Tapiola, were built in the eastern parts of the district. The area around building No 3 on Kontiontie street, designed by Kaija and Heikki Siren, introduces visitors to a calm garden city atmosphere.

The immediate surroundings of the Exhibition Centre WeeGee in Länsi-Tapiola provide an excellent overview of the concept and construction of a garden city. A short walking tour includes terraced houses designed by Kaija and Heikki Siren, Viljo Revell’s ‘Hip Flasks’ and the centre of this western neighbourhood.

Visitors to Otsolahti’s green neighbourhood will learn about the area’s manor house history, the garden city movement in Tapiola and world-class housing architecture. The tour starts and ends on the shores of Otsolahti, a few minutes’ walk from the metro station. Alternatively, your guide can pick your group up from the metro or WeeGee, which will make the tour slightly longer.

You can decide for yourselves the duration of the day’s programme to best suit your needs. For lunch, you could stop by at the Exhibition Centre WeeGee, or have dinner at restaurant Kylä, to name a few options. And whatever you choose to do, the metro provides a convenient link to Espoo City Museum’s visitors from near and far.