Architecture & Design Museum, Building A

This guide to the Architecture & Design Museum in Helsinki starts with university students filing up these stairs for winter calisthenics, then rewinds to 1899, when architect Magnus Schjerfbeck raised the building as the Tieteellisten seurain talo, the House of Scientific Societies, nicknamed Pöllölä, the owl house. You'll hear about the seven learned societies who once filled its reading rooms, and why they abandoned the building before the First World War. Listen for how engineers reworked ceremonial halls to survive a gymnasium's pounding feet.