Photo: Multifoto/Johan Ljungqvist
Experience of the Month, Finland
Fiskars Village, Raseborg – the versatile gem of south-western Finland Just over an hour’s drive west of Helsinki, there is a village that has become a hub for Finnish art and design – a community based on the foundation of what used to be a thriving industrial centre: Fiskars Village. In a relatively short time, the village has become a multi-awarded, hip design and cultural centre – a place with an urban feel in the middle of a historically significant setting.
and has experienced a new renaissance from the early ‘90s, when a visionary man, Ingmar Lindberg, re-imagined the village as a community of craftspeople, artists and designers that could revive the sleepy town.
By Katariina Benedetti
Fiskars Village was the most significant iron manufacturing centre in the 17th century in Finland, which was part of the Swedish crown at the time. Founded in 1649, the village experienced dramatic 112 | Issue 132 | January 2020
ups and downs due to social and historical events, from the golden era of industrialisation to the decadence following the closure of the foundry. But Fiskars Village has been able to reinvent itself
Lindberg, an executive at Fiskars – a world-famous metal tool company, producing, among other things, scissors, axes and gardening tools – envisaged a place that could attract a variety of people, who could work together and once again