The museum director of the Architecture & Design Museum in Helsinki Pilvi Kalhama took part in a three-day gathering of European architecture institutions hosted by the Danish Architecture Center DAC in Copenhagen. The event invited participants to reflect on how architectural institutions can create cultural value and cohesion in a time marked by climate crisis, social instability, and growing divides.
Pilvi Kalhama, Director of the Architecture & Design Museum, contributed with a talk on the evolving role of cultural institutions. She highlighted how museums today navigate a rapidly shifting landscape shaped by digitalization, the demand for inclusion, and the redefinition of public space. Kalhama’s talk was tightly knitted to the new Architecture & Design Museum currently being developed in Helsinki, planned to open to the public in 2030. At the heart of her message was a call for institutions to strengthen their roles as democratic arenas and to remain self-aware of the ways they might also be part of the challenges they seek to address.
Even though the construction of the new museum building is on the horizon, Kalhama emphasized placemaking as a continuous, collaborative civic practice that centres people rather than buildings. Good places, she noted, are never finished; they develop alongside the communities that inhabit them. Extending this idea, she asked how institutions can “design” conditions for social cohesion and ensure that diverse voices feel welcome and represented.
She concluded by urging cultural institutions to remain flexible and open-ended. Even for a museum dedicated to architecture and design, the future role of the institution should not be fully designed in advance, but shaped through dialogue, participation, and shared imagination.
Main photo: Anni Koponen, Architecture and Design Museum