Keilalahti Campus: Nokia House and the changing face of Finnish technology
A technology landmark on the water
On the waterfront at Keilalahti in Espoo, a former corporate headquarters offers a different way to read Finland’s technological history. Nokia House became associated with the country’s mobile-phone era; subsequent occupants adapted the buildings to new businesses and working habits. The campus is still a workplace, not a museum of vanished telephones. Its interest lies in the way architecture has outlasted changes of company name and corporate strategy.
The site sits beside busy transport corridors, including Länsiväylä and the Ring I approach, while its waterside setting brings a different scale into the composition. Glass, steel and timber are central to the architectural identity. Rather than a single sealed monument, the design connects office volumes through shared spaces and views. Those relationships help explain why the complex could be reused instead of being treated as inseparable from one tenant.
Pekka Helin was the principal architect of the headquarters completed in 1997, working within Helin & Siitonen. The design history began earlier: a 1983 invited competition produced a proposal by Helin and Tuomo Siitonen, but planning and taxation issues delayed progress. A further competition at the turn of 1994–1995 responded to a Nokia that had changed substantially during the intervening years.
Building for a changing company
The architectural documentation gives daylight and the surrounding landscape an important role inside. Atriums provide shared spaces between the office areas, with steel structures, glass and timber detailing. A double facade was designed to moderate external thermal loads and reduce cooling and heating demand. These features belong to the original project’s technical ambitions, not to a claim that its energy performance has been freshly measured today.
Nokia’s own December 2012 announcements confirm that the company had occupied the building since 1997. That month it agreed a sale and leaseback with the Finnish investor Exilion for €170 million, and then reported completion. The transaction changed property ownership while Nokia continued as a tenant. It should be distinguished from the later changes to the mobile-phone business: a building sale and a business transfer are not the same event.
Microsoft subsequently occupied parts of the former headquarters, and Tieto’s campus introduced another phase of reuse. Helin & Co’s account describes the conversion as retaining worthwhile original elements, including solid-timber batten ceilings, while creating a specific Tieto identity. The history is therefore visible in continuity as well as replacement: materials and shared volumes remained useful even as the names associated with them changed.
An office designed around movement and data
The Tieto adaptation reorganised work into areas for quiet concentration, teamwork, communication and informal breaks. It challenged the assumption that a desk permanently assigned to an individual was the basic unit of office life. Meeting rooms, project spaces and shared lounges supported different tasks. For a reader interested in design, the campus illustrates how changes in the organisation of work can transform an existing headquarters without erasing its architectural frame.
The project description’s most striking feature is a light artwork of 80,000 LEDs in a 30-metre-high atrium, visualising data flows. The same account describes sensors monitoring occupancy and environmental conditions, with information helping users locate available workspaces. These are documented features of the adaptation, rather than a promise about which installation a casual visitor will encounter in operation on a particular day.
Old and new material choices belong to the same story. Retained timber ceilings give the conversion a connection to Nokia House, while the newer arrangement prioritises acoustics and flexible shared rooms. The waterfront is not merely a backdrop for an exterior photograph: the architects explicitly made the surrounding landscape part of the interior experience. That interplay between corporate scale and the sea is one of the site’s defining qualities.
The name on the address, and how to approach it
The current corporate name needs its own date. Tietoevry’s annual general meeting approved a change to Tieto on 24 March 2026, and the new registered name took effect in the Finnish Trade Register on 30 March. The company’s current directory lists Tieto offices at Keilalahdentie 2–4, Espoo. Older references to Tietoevry, Tieto or Nokia House can describe different stages of the same campus history, without establishing that every former occupant remains there.
Keilaniemi is served by the metro and the light-rail network. HSL’s route information places the western light-rail terminus near the metro station’s northern entrance. Use the current journey planner for the final approach to Keilalahdentie, rather than relying on an old office name in a saved route. The district can be understood through its streets and permitted public viewpoints without assuming access to the working floors.
The architects’ project account described visitor functions in the lobby, restaurant and lower meeting areas, with upper office floors reserved for staff. That historical design arrangement is not a standing invitation for an architectural tour: any interior visit should be confirmed with reception. Keilalahti’s appeal is a living history of Finnish design and technology, where the same glass and timber framework has accommodated successive ideas about how people communicate and work.