FINLAND'S CULTURAL FINESSE

The $58 million privately funded museum arrives less than two years after Helsinki's City Council  rejected a plan to build a $138 million Guggenheim museum along the city's harbor..............

AN UNDERGROUND museum grabs widespread attention in Finland's capital. The novelist Meg Woltizer once wrote that Helsinki is
''A place no one ever thinks about unless they're - listening to Sibelius, or lying on the hot, wet slats of a sauna, or eating a bowl of reindeer.

Amos Rex, a contemporary art museum, goes along way toward achieving that goal. A building that appears to physically resist its placement in a vast underground space-

It is topped by by five comical domes that bubble up from the surface of the Lasipalatsi Square in central Helsinki like inverted craters of an alien moonscape.

Children and students clamber up the mounds, teenagers skateboard down its slopes, and passers-by snap selfies.

 ''That was one of the intentions, to make it like a playground, and also to make a kind of new city space and city culture,'' said Asmo Jaaski, lead architect of JKMM, the Museum's designer.

The weeklong series of parties and special events around the official Aug 30 opening drew some  10,000 visitors, including the national art cognoscenti and scores of  international journalists , making it one of the most eventful cultural happenings in the Finnish capital in years.

''It's what we hoped for but it's more than we dared to expect,'' said the museum director, Karl Kartio.

''Since the opening we've had endless lines.''