New HDW Meeting Points announced

Instead of a single main venue, Helsinki Design Week will be built around several HDW Meeting Points across central Helsinki this year. In addition to the HDW Lab, the Meeting Points include the installations Marimekko and Futuro at Helsinki Design Week and the Iittala 90 Pavilion, the street food pop-up Wild Mushroom Bar by Sami Tallberg, and the AD Museum space at Eteläranta 6.

A guided tour of the Meeting Points will take place on 3 September at 4 pm and run for approximately 2.5 hours. The tour offers an introduction to the festival’s different locations and requires advance registration.

Wild Mushroom Bar by Sami Tallberg

To celebrate the early September harvest, Helsinki Design Week is bringing award-winning chef and author Sami Tallberg’s Wild Mushroom Bar by Sami Tallberg to the city centre. Inspired by Madrid’s renowned mushroom restaurant El Cisne Azul, the pop-up street kitchen focuses exclusively on wild mushrooms and will open at Aleksanterinkatu 9, in front of Kluuvi.

Wild Mushroom Bar is a collaboration between several creative partners. The project brings together designer Lauri Johansson, graphic designer Ilkka Kärkkäinen, and the companies Metos, Vaarnii, Durat and Saas Instruments. The event is also made possible by Kluuvi, which is providing the space and supporting the collaboration.

Wild Mushroom Bar will be open to the public for just four days, 2–5 September from noon to 7 pm. In addition to mushroom dishes, the bar will also offer wine. The street kitchen doesn’t take table reservations — seating is on a first-come, first-served basis.

From an object to an architectural experience

To mark the 90th anniversary of Alvar Aalto’s iconic vase, Iittala and Hydro bring the Aalto 90 Pavilion to Helsinki Design Week: a seven-metre aluminium structure following the vase’s silhouette.

Designed with Lars Beller Fjetland and TABLEAU CPH and built with low-carbon aluminium from Hydro, the pavilion sits at the meeting point of Finnish design history, architecture and material innovation. For Helsinki Design Week, it is the setting for an exhibition by photographer Arno Rafael Minkkinen, presented by Iittala as part of The Spirit of Aalto.

For more than five decades, Minkkinen has photographed the relationship between the human body and the natural world, working without assistants or digital manipulation. Here he turns to another lasting Finnish form: the Aalto Vase.

He returns to selected works from his archive and pairs them with new photographs made for this project. Shown as diptychs, the images move between past and present, body and object, nature and design. Rather than photographing the vase itself, Minkkinen responds to the spirit of the vase. The exhibition is part of The Spirit of Aalto, Iittala’s anniversary-year series inviting contemporary artists to interpret the vase’s legacy in their own practice.

Inside the pavilion, architecture, photography and design meet across generations, serving as a reminder that this iconic design isn’t fixed in the past, but is a form still capable of producing new ideas, 90 years on.

Helsinki Design Week 28.8.-6.9.2026