The National Museum of Finland, designed by the architectural firm Gesellius, Lindgren, Saarinen and built between 1906 and 1910, is situated on a large plot bounded by a stone wall. Viewed from the south the building is dominated by a tall and slender tower, while viewed from the east the continuously running enclosure wall lends the ensemble a horizontal quality. The museum building's massing is based on a spatial solution in which departments presenting different periods spread out as wings around the central hall. Each department has been built to express the character of the period it presents, creating strong variation in the building's exterior. In the interiors' rooms, which vary in size and form, rigidity and symmetry have been deliberately avoided. The model for the central hall at the building's core was the hall of the Finnish Pavilion at the Paris Exposition of 1900. Pillar-supported vaulted arches are decorated with Akseli Gallen-Kallela's Kalevala frescoes, which the artist executed largely on the basis of the frescoes he created for the Paris Pavilion. The building's national-romantic formal language incorporates motifs from Finnish church and castle architecture, among others, and the decorative motifs on the facades employ nature and animal ornamentation typical of national romanticism. As surface materials, in addition to soapstone and render, the rough-hewn domestic granite favoured in national-romantic architecture has been used.
Official description (Museovirasto) — machine-translated from Finnish
The National Museum of Finland is a museum in Helsinki presenting Finnish history from the Stone Age to the present day, through objects and cultural history. The Finnish National Romantic style building is located at Mannerheimintie 34 in central Helsinki and is a part of the Finnish Heritage Agency, under the Ministry of Culture and Education.