University of Helsinki

Campus History

The Viikki campus is located in a culturally and historically valuable landscape, cultivated since the Middle Ages. The area’s development into a university campus and science park dates back to 1946, when it was converted from a Prison Service into a research farm of the University of Helsinki.

The first department facilities of the Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry – namely those of Agriculture, Food, Home Economics and Environmental Sciences – were constructed in Viikki in the 1960s. The first student residences were built in the Latokartano Student Village around the same time.

A new wave of construction started in the 1990s, when the decision to build the Viikki Science Park was made in 1993. Info Centre Korona, the main building of the campus, Biocentres 1, 2 and 3, and the Cultivator I and II company incubators were completed before and after the turn of the millennium. The forest science departments of the Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry transferred to the Forest Sciences Building in 2002.

The Biocentres became the home of the Departments of Biology and Pharmacy, both in the Faculty of Science. They were made into two independent faculties at the beginning of 2004: the Faculty of Biosciences and the Faculty of Pharmacy. The Faculty of Veterinary Medicine also began to move its activities from its previous facilities in Hermanni to the new facilities on the northern rim of the campus.

Viikki is today the second largest of the University of Helsinki's four campuses. The old cultivated landscape now houses an active academic community.