Office of the President of the Republic of FinlandPress release 18/202520 March 2025 The public will have the opportunity to visit the temporary residence of the President of the Republic of Finland in Munkkiniemi on Saturday 29 March 2025 between 11.00 and 16.00 Visitors arriving before 15.00 will be admitted but no new queuers will be allowed after this time The visit will take place in the public areas of the residence visitors will have access to three different rooms each featuring contemporary art selected by the presidential couple but questions about the premises and the works of art on display will be answered by staff from the Office of the President of the Republic of Finland and the artists The tour is estimated to take approximately 20 minutes Open house events have been held at the Presidential Palace in Helsinki in 2009 For more information on the temporary residence of the President of the Republic, click here The doors of the temporary residence of the President of the Republic of Finland will be open to the public on Saturday 29 March 2025 from 11.00 to 16.00 Visitors arriving before 15.00 will still be admitted The entrance is at Kalastajatorpantie 3 (main doors) Visitors are invited to enter from the direction of Uimarinpolku The tour starts at the main entrance and passes through the dining room and the reception room with a fireplace The tour ends at the side entrance of the residence Visitors are reminded that there are no cloakrooms and that they must keep their outer clothing with them during the tour Bags or rucksacks cannot be taken on the tour but can be left in a guarded area outside the residence Wheelchair users will be guided along an accessible route More news Office of the President of the Republic of FinlandMariankatu 2FI-00170 HelsinkiFinland Tel. +358 (0)29 522 6000kirjaamo@tpk.fi © Office of the President of the Republic of Finland 2024 Accessibility statement of Presidentti.fi Find upcoming events at the Events.hel.fi website. Find municipal decisions in the Decision-making section. Open image viewerThe president's temporary official residence in Helsinki's Munkkiniemi district 16:07A police officer died by suicide while working as a security guard at the temporary official residence of President Alexander Stubb in Helsinki The outlet reportedOpens an external website on Friday that Stubb and his family were at the Munkkiniemi district residence that weekend in November when an on-duty security guard shot himself with a shotgun in the building's basement Other guards found the officer's body Stubb was informed immediately about the matter and met with staff at the Presidential Palace early the following week to discuss the incident Yle requested a comment from Stubb and the president's office "The security of the President of the Republic is ensured in all situations The President's security guard detail is employed by the Helsinki Police Department The Helsinki Police Department is responsible for communications concerning its personnel," the email stated the Eastern Uusimaa Police Department said that officers began working on a cause of death investigation related to an incident in Munkkiniemi on Sunday 3 November The department said they took on the case because it concerned a Helsinki Police employee "The incident is not related to the person's work duties at the Helsinki Police Department Since it is a cause of death investigation the police will not provide any further information about the matter," the press release stated Detective Inspector Josefiina Hiltunen said she would neither confirm nor deny whether the investigation concerned the incident at the president's residence MTV also reported about another police officer's suicide that took place earlier this week at the National Police Board's offices in Otaniemi the Western Uusimaa Police Department said it was investigating the death of a person who worked for the police in an incident that took place at the Police Board's offices in Espoo on Tuesday 4 February The department said police were notified about the incident at around 7:30am that day The National Police Board's human resources chief said the agency does not comment about individual suicides Koivu said that four police officers had taken their own lives last year She emphasised that every suicide is a human tragedy that not only affects victims but also their colleagues and their families Koivu further noted that police departments offer various forms of support for employees who have been affected by such tragedies In urgent situations you can always call emergency services at 112 or seek assistance from a hospital's emergency room we’d like to thank you for joining the debate - we’re glad you’ve chosen to participate and we value your opinions and experiences Please choose your username under which you would like all your comments to show up Please keep your posts respectful and abide by the community guidelines - and if you spot a comment you think doesn’t adhere to the guidelines please use the ‘Report’ link next to it to let us know Please preview your comment below and click ‘post’ when you’re happy with it The temporary residence of the President of the Republic of Finland in Munkkiniemi opened its doors to the general public on Saturday 29 March 2025 The event was attended by approximately 1,800 visitors The tour took the visitors through the public areas of the residence The visit started at the main entrance and passed through the dining room and the fireplace room but staff from the Office of the President and the artists of the exhibited works were present to answer any questions The State Guest House in Munkkiniemi serves as the temporary residence of the President of the Republic during the renovation of the permanent Mäntyniemi residence in Meilahti The renovation of Mäntyniemi began in March 2024 and will be completed in spring 2026 Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker HELSINKI FINLAND Temporary residence of the President of the Republic of Finland Photo: Office of the President of the Republic of Finland The public will have a rare opportunity to visit the temporary residence of the President of the Republic of Finland in Munkkiniemi The open house event will run from 11:00 to 16:00 Guests will be able to explore three rooms in the residence each displaying contemporary art selected by President Alexander Stubb and First Lady Suzanne Innes-Stubb staff from the Office of the President of the Republic of Finland and the artists will be on hand to answer questions The estimated duration of the visit is 20 minutes Open house events have previously been held at the Presidential Palace in 2009 The entrance is located at Kalastajatorpantie 3 with visitors asked to arrive from the direction of Uimarinpolku The tour route will pass through the dining room and conclude at the side entrance of the residence Visitors must keep their outer clothing with them Bags and rucksacks are not permitted on the tour and prams or pushchairs must be left in a guarded area outside but commercial photography is strictly prohibited Advertisement inquiries and other after-sales issues: info@helsinkitimes.fi Helsinki Times is the first and only English language newspaper providing news about Finland in English A weekly print edition of Helsinki Times was published from March 2007 up until Feb Helsinki Times is an online-only publication and other groups and individuals interested in Finland from all around the world © Helsinki Times All rights reserved.  Terms of Use | Privacy Policy Published in 4/2021 - Housing Interview The conversion of office building into apartments was based on A6 Architects’ winning proposal in a competition Kone’s former office building in Munkkiniemi stands in a prominent location What principles did you apply when complementing the historical environment with the surrounding three-to-four-storey apartment buildings we offered a swap: we will give away a piece of the plot in the north and instead stretch the plot in the direction of Munkkiniemen puistotie in this way it could be made sufficiently long and prominent to earn its place as paring with the large building We designed specifically a terraced house for the site because this gave the building a tighter and simpler look than a standard low-rise apartment building with one to three stairwells We also added two storeys to the office building because it offered a very attractive place for roof terraces We designed our proposal on the conditions determined by the cityscape which undoubtedly partly contributed to the success We nevertheless had a hunch that the additional construction would help us succeed in the competition With the additional construction we also increased the overall quality: the upper floors of the apartments have their own terraces and all parking spaces are hidden beneath the terraced house What kind of relationship did you seek to create between the original The building consisted of anonymous office space in other words there was hardly anything original that needed to be preserved It was of utmost importance to preserve the white concrete grid of the facades but the surfaces of the upper floors had to be renewed: they are chamfered precisely in the same way as the original ones so that the windows now open all the way to the floor the bottom parts of the windows were black exposed aggregate concrete We added a flat steel railing in front of all the windows which is a reminder of the original subdivision of the facades even though only some of the glazed areas are sliding glass Introducing cantilevered balconies would have changed the facade too much We designed conservatories inside the building frame but we designed them so that in terms of their style they could also be from the 1970s The original concrete surfaces on the ground and first floors were retained The re-surfaced upper floors are comprised of white concrete elements with a smoother finish and therefore we gave a protective coating also to the old concrete elements of the lower floors they form a more natural material pairing with the rendered walls of the terraced house What were the objectives in the design of the dwellings in this project Very heavy renovation construction like this is more expensive than new construction so the developer wanted excellence from the apartments and it was less important how many rooms would fit into a given amount of square metres We deliberately designed a wide range of apartments of different sizes The structural frame determined the dimensions: a living room or two bedrooms could be fitted between one column spacing and one could not become fixated on an optimal room size It was nice for a change to be involved in a project where you could design something more spacious Your office has designed the conversion for residential use of several office buildings dating from the 1960s and 1970s; work is currently underway in the Finnish Broadcasting Company’s former offices Radiotalo What are the biggest problems and opportunities for such projects The main difficulty is to place heavy modern infrastructure into old buildings without the basic ambience being ruined in the Kone building this was easy; water-circulating underfloor heating and ceiling cooling systems were built and apartment-specific ventilation units were added The issue arose of how to make the facades work when replacement air has to flow in and out Both of these buildings have a similar distinct frame structure and so you have to look at what can be sensibly fitted into the frame One cannot apply the model floor plans used in new buildings resulting even in rather exciting homes – those that one would never otherwise design More photos and drawings of the project → Article there are currently around 50 city blocks’ worth of empty office space there seems to be a constant demand for housing Under what preconditions are office spaces converted into apartments the perimeter block has become the go-to urban typology in Finnish urban planning and a symbol of urban life The potential lies in more subtle design choices The research-based colour design is weakly known in Finland Colour researcher Saara Pyykkö shares her insights on what an architect should know about colour Subscribe The regional headquarters of Pfizer in Vanha Munkkiniemi Published in 1/2024 - The Heart of the City The growth of the Helsinki region is a challenge for the development of Helsinki’s city centre The urban development ideals that have taken over the planning in Helsinki over the last few decades have failed to recognize the nature of urbanization in the long term perspectives arising from the sphere of urban economics have been adopted as policy on rather flimsy grounds An example of this discourse is the so-called “urban shortage” that was heavily featured in the Helsingin Sanomat newspapersome years ago referring to the scarceness of land area regarded as being urban in terms of its population density.1 Over the last couple of years discussions sparked by a type of change hangover in Helsinki have revolved around the waning of the inner city It is regrettable that the debate is dominated by abstract ideological and theoretical perspectives even though the nature of the problem is very much concrete – geographic and geometric In order to understand the current development we might look at the 1992 and 2002 master plans which constitute a significant turning point The former initiated the relocation of harbour functions away from the inner city the latter allocated the areas vacated as a result to housing The latest layer in this development is represented by the City Plan 2050 a long-term strategic land use plan launched in 2013 aspires to be more Continental than all the Continental European cities themselves The physical realities of the Helsinki region are already evident in the very early metropolitan visions In his 1915 plan for the Munkkiniemi–Haaga districts has a relatively small amount of land area suitable for development around the city centre in comparison to the other Nordic capitals.2 However the impact of the city’s geographic characteristics on future development was not truly recognized until the debate that followed the Pro Helsingfors plan that Saarinen and Bertel Jung drew up three years later and the city’s first master town plan drawn up by Berndt Aminoff in 1932.3 A potent three-part series of articles by a young Pauli Blomstedt published in Arkkitehti questioned the visions of the contemporary powers that be.4 Blomstedt was ahead of his time in recognizing a shift that would not be realised in Helsinki until the period spanning from the 1960s to the 2000s He served up his own vision with striking acuity: “Never again shall we witness the birth of the type of metropolises that exist today Should the cities that are currently in the region of a quarter of a million inhabitants ever grow their population into the millions their land area would correspond to that of an entire province A future metropolis might be ‘the City’ to which people living in the country come to work during the day and to play in the evenings.” Blomstedt’s view was that density and accessibility are interchangeable attributes of a metropolis as Blomsted also referred to it in Finnish – does not need to become more densely built nor does it need to be relocated in the name of efficiency but the historical centre can be preserved as the city centre by building onto the archipelago and the shoreline suburban development (the “outer settlement” in Blomstedt’s words) that supports a smallish city centre requires an efficient and functioning transport system The urban planning that was implemented over the following decades primarily consisted of selected notations made as an aside to Blomstedt’s critical observations Both of the development trends recognized by Blomstedt have been noticeable in the urban planning for the Helsinki Metropolitan Area as a continuous push and pull between the city centre and the suburban areas Work on the regional transport system has been overshadowed by the national transport policy adopted in the 1960s and the situation is not alleviated by the fact that public transport is being developed in an inner-city-centric fashion in accordance with the suburban transport principles created in 1926.5 The matter is also not helped by the fact that the City of Helsinki has stuck to Saarinen’s and Jung’s ideal of the “little Greater Helsinki” a metropolis that encompasses a peripheral expansion of the small inner city some five million square metres in gross floor area of new housing have been built in Helsinki’s inner city on land that has become available through the relocation of harbour and industrial operations this ambitious urban renewal has increased the size of the inner city’s building stock by a third five sixths of this growth has been directed outside of the city centre the density of central Helsinki is on a par with the other Nordic capitals the population of the surrounding region is smaller than in Stockholm for the simple reason that Helsinki The city’s geographic special characteristic is identifiable in the implemented fabric: a restricted historical centre and an urban fringe that spans several municipalities If an urban economist considers Helsinki to be a puny capital it is because of the land area and not the volume or quality of construction in the central area.6 whether the proclaimed shortage of urban land is ultimately more problematic for the suburbia than it is for the inner city itself The increase in travel speeds that began in the 1960s generated a rather unstructured “commuter zone” alongside the inner city and a suburban fringe without a distinct identity came about as an inexpensive alternative for functions that spilled out of the city centre it changed the position of the inner city permanently.7 Back in the 1980s the suburbs were still viewed to have grown on the coat-tails of the historical city but the recent discussions on the waning of the city centre demonstrate that the inner city is just as much a dependant of its suburban surroundings The transformation of inner Helsinki that started in the 1990s is now a few last districts away from completion Even though the gross floor area of the building stock has increased during this period from 16.6 million to 21.6 million square metres the inner city’s share of the region’s population has remained steady at around 15 percent The inner city development has focussed strongly on housing which is evident in the decrease in the relative proportion of overall construction volume While the inner city building stock in the 1990s still made up a quarter of the construction in the overall metropolitan area and the increasing housing in the centre diminishes its regional significance This is not a problem for central living per se but the city centre has lost its position of representing the entire metropolitan area due to the changing structure the future fabric of the city is more loosely built than the historical centre the selection of a non-representative fifth as the basis for policy would be regarded as objectionable idealism or populism the way that the inner city has been built and its importance for the whole area has been taken as gospel unanticipated challenges for the current development of the Helsinki Metropolitan Area It is of note that the role of the inner city when examined in both absolute and relative terms If the population in the Helsinki Region is to reach the declared ideal of two million maintaining the inner city’s relative size in proportion to the overall urban area would require a 1.5-fold increase in the inner city’s building stock this would entail the doubling of the pre-1990s built volume or the quadrupling of the volume of areas developed within the last 30 years The current plans show no signs of such visions the focus of development has remained outside of central Helsinki the suburban area is four times the size of the inner city when it comes to the population and three times larger when it comes to the volume of building stock The combined population of the surrounding municipalities in the greater Helsinki Region already exceeds that of Helsinki’s inner city and people living in this outer fringe have no need to travel to central Helsinki – with the arrival of electric cars it would even appear to be wiser for the residents to use the services offered at the hypermarkets located along the ring road.8 It is outrageous that the outer municipalities have been left waiting for 30 years for the tramlines to reach them The ideal in public transport plans can no longer be to find the scheme that offers the greatest capacity or simply feeds inner Helsinki but rather to identify the mode of transport that best suits the entire landscape and the changing traffic directions Could it be time to turn our gaze towards the suburbs and begin to view them as something that is not merely an undeveloped stage in the evolution of a historical urban ideal but as something whose existence is justified in its own right ANSSI JOUTSINIEMI is an Associate Professor of Urban Design and Planning at the University of Oulu Curtis wrote a memorial text about his friend Turku and Oulu are planning to build event arenas in central locations an arena built above the railway has been in use for a good two years What kind of cityscape is being constructed along these megaprojects Open image viewerIor Bock Image: YLE24.10.2010 20:39•Updated 9.11.2010 18:16Police say he was stabbed to death with a bread knife in his apartment in Helsinki’s Munkkiniemi district on Saturday Two foreign men who shared his home have been detained Police say they served as his assistants and do not speak Finnish The daily Helsingin Sanomat reports that murder followed some sort of dispute with the men who had lived with him for about two years One of them called to report Bock's death Police are to decide by noon on Tuesday whether to formally place either of them under arrest Bock was partly paralysed following a previous attack in 1999 when he was stabbed in his apartment by an acquaintance He became near-legendary as a story-telling tour guide on the fortress island of Suomenlinna for nearly a quarter century He later gained a minor worldwide cult following for his eccentric philosophical and historical theories Helsinki District Court freed one of the two suspects held in Bock's murder The man still being held was born in India in 1982