The polycarbonate-clad Garage Museum of Contemporary Artwork, made by Rem Koolhaas’ firm OMA, has opened in a refurbished Soviet-era restaurant in Moscow’s Gorky Park .
The museum, which opened yesterday, is the new residence for the gallery owned by Russian businesswoman and gallerist Dasha Zhukova.
The two-storey creating was derelict for 20 years just before currently being bought by Zhukova. Inside, some of the original Soviet mosaics have been preserved, and decorative tiles and brickwork elements were also stored intact.
“Typically art is now shown in white cubes, but we think this will generate a more fascinating interaction in between the past and the present,”Koolhaas told Dezeen in a film filmed at the launch of the project in London in 2012.
Koolhaas was lead architect on the refurbishment of the 54,000-square-metre developing, which now features a double-layered polycarbonate facade that wraps around the retained concrete construction of the former Vremena Goda restaurant.
“We located an abandoned, almost ruined restaurant from the 1960s in Gorky Park and made the decision to turn that into the new Garage,” Koolhaas explained to Dezeen.
“It was a very public building, the Soviets have been simple, but had generous spaces,” he extra. “We decided to accept almost almost everything of that building, even even though it was quite ruined. So all we do is in fact clad what we located with a skin of polycarbonate.”
The translucent plastic skin is raised two metres off the ground to let the ground-floor spaces to open out to the surrounding park. Dark panelling clads the lower portion of the developing.
The Garage gallery was founded in 2008 by Zhukova and takes its identify from its former residence – a 1920s industrial garage created by Russian architect Konstantin Melnikov.
The gallery’s new property retains an architectural website link to its former building in the form of two eleven-metre-wide garage-type doors that fold horizontally and lift up in the middle of every single of the structure’s longest sides to generate entrances, growing seven metres above roof degree.
Model exhibiting the eleven-metre-wide, garage-style doors
Five exhibition galleries are spread out through the creating. Other spaces include an auditorium, educational regions, a bookshop and a cafe.
The centre won’t be completely comprehensive until September, when a red-metal staircase will provide accessibility to a roof terrace.
The design for the new gallery was unveiled in 2012 and was originally due to complete in 2014, but the state of the building meant that it needed far more function than initially expected.
The close by Hexagon, a 1920s exhibition centre that when housed one particular of Europe’s greatest cinemas, has also been purchased by Zhukova’s partner and Chelsea Football Club owner Roman Abramovich.
The Hexagon’s ring of six pavilions, connected on their inner sides to kind a geometric courtyard, will also be redeveloped with a design and style by OMA.
OMA is at the moment doing work on a string of renovations, which includes turning a 19th century creating in Paris into a gallery and artists studios, and the conversion of a historic Venetian palazzo into a department keep.
The firm has just finished work on the Fondazione Prada arts centre in Milan, a converted distillery that features a “haunted home” clad in 24-carat gold leaf and a cinema camouflaged by mirrors.
Other conversions of Soviet-era buildings in Moscow include Archiproba’s transformation of a telecommunications building into offices and MVRDV’s project to flip the Hammer and Sickle steel factory into a new urban quarter.
