The new extension for Tampere Art Museum creates a landmark for the museum articulating the urban landscape between Pyynikintori square and the park surrounding the current museum. The extension joins the series of public buildings along Pirkankatu and makes the museum more visible to the busy main street attracting new visitors to the museum. The new extension, compact in footprint and similar in scale to the existing museum building, preserves as much as possible of the park area surrounding the museum and allows for supplementary building suitable to the scale of the surrounding urban structure in the area.

The ground and third floor of the five-story extension open up to the surrounding cityscape, making the city part of the museum and the museum part of the city. The exhibition circulation of the extension continues via an underground connection to the existing museum building enabling flexible and versatile exhibition arrangements. The red-brick extension forms a counterpart to the existing museum building, a former grain granary, and interprets the continuum of historical industrial buildings in Tampere.