Historia & Tulevaisuus — The Temple to the Forum | On Typology

A 120,000-square-foot museum on the Turku waterfront, and the case for the museum that stops preserving the past and starts participating in the future.

At this point, we have a habit of asking the same question of every building brief we are handed. What is this kind of space, really? Who built the first one, and what were they defending when they built it? How has the typology adapted over time and what crutches does it come with? And, which of those old defensive instincts still hold weight in the version we have inherited, long after anyone remembers why?

We asked it of the automotive design studio and found a school hiding inside it. We asked it of a 1933 foundry on Jalan Besar and decided to keep the building talking. We asked it of the stadium and tried to give it back its ground. Now we are asking it of the museum, and the museum turns out to be the most interesting subject yet, because it is the one building type that is openly, visibly, in the middle of changing its mind about what it is.

The project that made us ask has a tell in its very name. It is not the Turku Museum of History. It is the Museum of History and Future. That conjunction is the whole argument, and it is worth earning slowly.

The Museum Began as a Temple

Start with the word, because the word has meaning and history. Museum comes from the Greek mouseion, the seat of the Muses, and a mouseion was a temple.[1] The most famous stood in Alexandria around 280 BCE, attached to the great Library, a sanctuary for scholarship and the gods thought to preside over it. The museum did not begin as a place to store objects. It began as a holy place, and remarkably, that origin has yet to be fully erased.

The private version came next. In the Renaissance, princes and scholars assembled the Wunderkammer, the wonder-room. An experiential “cabinet of curiosities” showcasing coral and coins, clocks and engineering marvels, and the occasional unicorn horn all crowded onto shelves as proof that the owner’s mind could hold the whole world in one room.[1] Collecting was a display of power. You did not walk through a cabinet of curiosities. You were granted access to one.

Then the doors opened, slowly with time and iteration. The Ashmolean in Oxford opened to the public in 1683. As the first of its kind, it was built around a collection a gardener named Tradescant had gathered, and a lawyer named Ashmole had acquired.[1] The real rupture came in Paris. In 1793, in the middle of the Revolution, the new republic turned the royal palace of the Louvre into a public museum. This pivot was framed as an act of liberation. Art that had belonged to kings now belonged to the nation.[2] The museum had found its modern justification. It was democratic, and it was now becoming a place for everyone.

And then the museum got its building. In 1830, Karl Friedrich Schinkel finished the Altes Museum in Berlin, and it set the template that still governs the type. A broad flight of steps. A long colonnade. A central rotunda quoting the Pantheon. As you ascend toward culture as you once ascended toward an altar, you are meant to fall quiet inside, under the dome.[3] Schinkel called it a sanctuary, and he meant it as praise. The museum was now a secular temple, a place the citizen entered to be improved by looking.

Notice what has carried through, from Alexandria to Berlin, across more than two thousand years. The museum preserves, and the museum is looked at. Reverence, hush, ascent, and experiential distance. In all of it the visitor is a spectator, standing respectfully before the past.

The Habit Hardens

The twentieth century did not break the habit. It perfected it.

In 1976 the artist Brian O’Doherty gave the perfected version its name. In a series of essays called Inside the White Cube, he described the modern gallery as a sealed white room, with no windows, no clock, and no visible world. A space engineered to lift the artwork out of time and society so nothing would interrupt the act of pure looking.[4] He did not mean it as a compliment. The white cube, he argued, was not neutral at all. It was an ideology pretending to be an absence of one. And it was the temple stripped down to its essential instruction: be quiet, stand back, do not touch, and most importantly do not take part.

Then, in 1997, the museum learned to shout. Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim dropped onto a dead shipyard in Bilbao, a titanium animal on the river, and within a few years a declining industrial city received millions of visitors who came, in large part, to see the building. Planners gave the phenomenon a name, the Bilbao Effect, and cities everywhere went shopping for their own icon.[5] It was a genuine leap. The museum was no longer only a sanctuary. It was an economic engine, a piece of civic strategy, and a photograph proving evidence of one’s travels.

But look closely at what actually changed, because less changed than it seemed. Bilbao swapped hush for spectacle and left the deeper habit untouched. It was still an object you traveled to and stood in front of. The visitor was still, fundamentally, a spectator. The museum had gotten louder without getting any more participatory.

So here is the inheritance, stated plainly. After two centuries, the museum still kept two instincts it had stopped questioning. It was a container of the past, sealed from the community that it served. And it was sealed from its environment — climate-controlled, and windowless. A white box holding its breath against the weather outside.

The Type Is Already Changing Its Mind

Across all of these examples, our discipline noticed. It has been arguing with itself for fifty years.

In 1971 the Canadian curator Duncan Cameron published a short, restless essay with a title that framed the whole debate: “The Museum, a Temple or the Forum?”[6] Cameron argued that the museum had quietly tried to be both and was failing at the second. A temple is where a society keeps what it has already decided is true and beautiful. A forum is where a society debates about what might be. Cameron wanted the museum to make room for the forum — for experiment and confrontation and voices that had never been let in. His model was the Anacostia Community Museum in Washington, where local residents helped make the exhibits about their own neighborhood. The expert was no longer the only author.

The idea grew into a movement. “New museology” in the 1980s turned the museum’s attention from its objects toward its public. By 2010, the American curator Nina Simon had written the field’s working manual, The Participatory Museum, which treated visitors not as consumers of a finished product but as co-creators of an unfinished one.[7] The question stopped being what we should show them. It became what can we make with them.

And then the type rewrote its own dictionary entry. In August 2022, in Prague, the International Council of Museums (ICOM) adopted a new official definition of the word museum, approved by roughly 92 percent of voting members.[8] The old definition had centered on acquiring, conserving, and displaying. The new one still conserves, but it adds language that would have puzzled Schinkel. A museum, ICOM now says, is accessible and inclusive, fosters diversity and sustainability, and operates “with the participation of communities,” offering “education, enjoyment, reflection and knowledge sharing.” Preservation is no longer the whole job. Participation and sustainability are now written into the brief.

Read the arc as a single sentence and the direction is unmistakable. The museum is moving from temple to forum, from container to platform, from preservation to participation. And newest of all, it moves from the sealed box toward something environmentally engaged, with full optimism that future buildings will be willing to let the world it has been holding at bay back inside.

What Turku Puts Back

Which brings us back to our initial conjunction. History and Future. The Museum of History and Future in Turku, Finland’s oldest city, is the shift built, and it answers the museum’s two-century inheritance with three corrections.

But first, the ground and its context, because the building is only the sharp end of a much larger civic move. The museum sits on Linnanniemi, the headland where the River Aura meets the sea, beside Turku Castle. For generations, that headland belonged to the port. Historically understood as a “working waterfront,” rail lines, terminal traffic, and the machinery of a shipping city cluttered access to the waterway for all people who lived behind it.

Over the past few years, the City of Turku has been slowly taking it back. A new joint ferry terminal, due in 2027, will consolidate port traffic and free the land around the castle for public use, and the master plan governing the whole district came from an international design competition held in 2020.[9] The western bank of the river mouth, shut to residents for most of the city’s modern history, is being reopened as a publicly accessible promenade that Turku’s City Board approved with its first new neighborhood there in March 2026.[10] The proposed museum, designed through open competition, is scheduled to open on that reclaimed ground around 2030.

That reclamation is not backdrop. It is the same argument the building makes, told at the scale of a city. A working port is a container too — sealed off, single-purpose, something the public skirts rather than enters. Turku is unsealing it and handing it back as common ground. The museum is the cultural anchor of that move, which means the typological and urban shifts are the same shift. Temple to forum, in land use.

The first correction is in the name. The brief is explicit that the building “does not simply preserve history, it participates in it,” reframing the museum as a connective hub between past and future, memory and innovation. This is not branding. It is a design instruction. A museum that merely preserves is a container, and a container has a lid. A museum that participates has to stay open at both ends or along all sides, letting the past inform what the city makes next rather than sealing it behind glass. The name is the thesis, and everything downstream obeys it.

The second correction is spatial. The design moves, in its own words, away from the traditional model of passive observation and toward a participatory environment. It is not a static container but an active platform for interaction, discovery, and collective knowledge. In practice, that means outdoor terraces and water decks, community rooms and cafés, and flexible modules that can turn into a maker fair one month and a seasonal installation the next. This is Cameron’s forum given a floor plan. It is Nina Simon’s participatory museum with a roof. The visitor who, for two hundred years, was asked to stand back and look is finally being asked to come in and take part.

The third correction is the one the white cube would have found unthinkable. Turku lets the environment in, and then puts it on display. The site is a waterfront with an unusual condition — here the water recedes rather than rises. The design works with that rhythm, exposing archipelagos in the dry seasons and expanding the waterscape in the wet ones, so that the building is landscape as much as architecture. And it takes the machinery that most museums bury — the stormwater basins and retention tanks — and makes them visible civic infrastructure, part of the thing you have come to see. Our proposed museum becomes, as the brief puts it, both landscape and architecture, infrastructure and cultural platform, tied to the City of Turku’s commitment to carbon neutrality by 2029.

That last move is the one we keep coming back to. The white cube’s entire project was to make the building disappear so the art could float free of the world. Turku does the opposite. It makes the building’s own metabolism legible — water and weather and the systems that manage them — and treats that legibility as the exhibit. We argued something close to this about the data center for those that are following along. We argued that the honest response to a big piece of infrastructure is not to disguise it but to make what it does visible. A museum is a gentler case, but the instinct is the same. Stop hiding the machine. Design it so people can read it.

Put the three together, and our proposal for Turku’s new museum answers, in architecture, the exact clause ICOM added to the definition in 2022. Participation, check! Sustainability, check! The proposed building design is the new definition, standing up.

A Method, Not a Move

None of this is a stylistic flourish, and it would be a mistake to read it as one. It is the method, the same one we bring to every type we are given. Ask what the building was for at the beginning. Find the argument it has forgotten it was ever having. Then design the correction, and let the correction do the talking.

The pattern holds across all of our work. Here, we give the museum back to its public and to its landscape — which is to say we give it back the two things the temple was built to keep at a respectful distance. The oldest museums were temples, and you went in to look. The Museum of History and Future is a forum, and you go in to take part. Finland’s oldest city built the museum that faces forward.

Credits. Work completed while Andy Lantz served as Co-CEO, Partner, and Global Creative Director at RIOS. Atlas Lantz Studio acknowledges the shared authorship of the RIOS teams.

Project team: Andy Lantz · Jenny Myers · Simone Lapenta · Dora Lin · Aditya Jagdale · Andy Magner · Chihiro Isono · Rachel Lee · Minzhi Lin · Leo Vargas Contreras.

Project visuals: Yanis Amasri.