After over six years of planning and construction, Renzo Piano Building Workshop’s colorful GES-2 House of Culture has officially opened its doors in Moscow.

Situated on the edge of Bolotnaya Square, Piano’s latest museum, once a former power station, is a testament to the old Soviet concept of culture houses that serve as versatile communal gathering spaces to promote arts, performance, learning, and civic engagement.

Done over in a vivid arctic white and meant as the permanent home to the V-A-C Foundation, the noted cultural designer’s careful effort to restore the disused early 20th-century structure has yielded a light-filled cavernous space that houses a theater, a large nave-like exhibition hall, and performances areas that are all also inundated with clean air taken in by a pair of distinct 70-meter high blue steel chimneys.

The 20,000-square-meter (215,280-square-foot) structure is split into five parts consisting of a front and main building, two parallel wings, and a 420-seat auditorium all connected by a “circulation web” of well-programmed lifts, stairs, platforms, corridors, and canopies. The right wing houses space for a rotating program of artists residencies opposite the left wing, which contains a restaurant and office spaces overlooking the main building’s Prospekt central pedestrian walkway and Vaults Arts Production Centre.

The museum will open with an installation from Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson in addition to a series of raves and pop-up performances surrounding a dance procession and exhibition that will explore the roots of carnival culture in contemporary Russian art. The House of Culture is free and open to the public as of December 4th. Information about visiting the museum can be found here.