Archinect - News

The new OMA-designed Garage Museum opens in Moscow

2015-06-12T17:47:00-04:00

The design is relatively straightforward and free of OMA’s usual quirky structural tricks, once you get past the sliding entrance portals. Plywood-lined steps...lead you to an educational area, where visitors can explore the Garage digital archive, and back down the terraced levels of a bookshop. Up on the main gallery floor, there’s a big open space, currently filled with ping-pong antics...When the building is finally completed in [Sept.], a big red staircase will lead up to an open roof-deck.

The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art opened this week in Moscow. Described by Rem Koolhaas as "not restoring the building, but preserving its decay," the OMA-helmed intervention comprised sheathing a Soviet-era restaurant in a polycarbonate skin. Funded by Dasha Zhukova, the museum is launching with exhibits by Rirkrit Tiravanija, Yayoi Kusama, and Taryn Simon.

Previously on Archinect:

Koolhaas-designed Garage Museum pavilion prepares for grand opening

2015-06-09T19:36:00-04:00

Dasha Zhukova’s Garage Museum for Contemporary Art is due to open the doors of its new $27m home in Gorky Park to invited guests on 10 June and the public two days later. The museum is housed in a Soviet-era pavilion that has been converted by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas [...]. In another riff on the building’s architecture, Garage will be hosting a conference in October on Soviet Modernism, a project of the Austrian curator Georg Schöllhammer [...].

To learn more about Garage's new Gorky Park building, click here.

Previously on Archinect:

The uncertain future of Moscow's urban renewal ambitions

2015-06-08T20:00:00-04:00

The plan was to create a new type of city that answered the needs of Moscow’s creative middle classes. But did the exit of Sergei Kapkov, the culture minister who ushered in these changes, also signal the end of the city’s urban revival? [...] “Kapkov’s reforms provided a whole generation of young creative types with a sense – perhaps somewhat illusory – that they could do things on a small scale; that there was a real fabric of life in a public city,” said Tsentsiper.

Rem Koolhaas and Dasha Zhukova share what's in store for the new Garage Museum

2015-01-19T18:09:00-05:00

In The Wall Street Journal Magazine's upcoming February issue, writer Tony Perrottet tells the history and potential of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art and its location in Moscow's Gorky Park, as he visits the site to meet with art philanthropist Dasha Zhukova and Rem Koolhaas. Founded by Zhukova in 2008, the Garage will move from its current location in a Shigeru Ban-designed pavilion to the former Soviet-era Vremena Goda that Koolhaas is converting into the new 58,000 sq.foot Garage Museum, set to open this June. Zhukova invested in the renovation project aiming to connect Moscow to the international art scene.

In conversation, Zhukova talks about the interests and knowledge of global culture in Moscow's youth, and their influence in shaping the Garage. Koolhaas talks about his design approach in restoring the decaying Vremena Goda amidst current museum-design trends. He also looks back to the time he spent in the U.S.S.R during the 1960s.

Garage Unveils Shigeru Ban Designed Pavilion in Gorky Park

2012-10-19T14:17:00-04:00

Garage Center for Contemporary Culture will be unveiling its new, temporary pavilion designed by Shigeru Ban in Moscow’s Gorky Park tomorrow.

The structure, located near the park's Pionersky Pond, uses locally produced paper tubes to create an oval wall that will be 7.5 meters high. The total area of the pavilion will be 2,400 square meters and will include an 800 square meter rectangular exhibition space, a bookshop and a café, all within an oval exterior constructed from cardboard tubes. The pavilion will host exhibitions and educational activities until late 2013, after which time it will be dedicated to experimental projects.

The first of these exhibitions, Temporary Structures in Gorky Park: From Melnikov to Ban, will inaugurate the space. Showing rare archival drawings – many of which have never been seen before – the exhibition will begin by revealing the profound history of structures created in the park since the site was first developed in 1923, before moving throu...