Forty-seven years after it first debuted as Moscow’s largest restaurant and nearly a quarter century after it was abandoned, the Seasons of the Year will finally see new tenants. The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art announced yesterday that its forthcoming permanent home inside the Soviet-era eatery in the capital’s central Gorky Park is due to open in June 2015. The nearly 54,000-square-foot space will initially host such exhibitions as new work by Rirkrit Tiravanija, a monumental installation by Eric Bulatov, and pieces from leading Russian and international artists.
Garage changed its name from Center for Contemporary Culture to Museum of Contemporary Art this past spring, a move that was meant to signal expansion plans not only for its building, but also for its programming. Founded in 2008 by Dasha Zhukova to display contemporary art, Garage now runs a booming education program, expects to open a public library devoted to contemporary art, and produces its own exhibitions under the guidance of Kate Fowle, its chief curator. “Garage’s new name reflects a long-term commitment to providing broad public access to contemporary art and ideas in Russia, a commitment that has been increasingly exhibited throughout Garage’s six-year history with robust educational programming,” the museum announced at the time of the name change.
With its new building — the institution’s first permanent home after two temporary sites — Garage is building a space custom fit for its increased ambitions. And Rem Koolhaas, who was tasked with transforming the abandoned restaurant's ruin for the museum, is leaving it largely untouched. “Perhaps in architecture, a profession that fundamentally is supposed to change things it encounters (usually before reflection), there ought to be an equally important arm of it that is concerned with not doing anything,” he announced while delivering the 2009 Byard Memorial Lecture at Columbia University, now printed in the book “Preservation is Overtaking Us.” Developed three years later, the new Garage edifice is an exercise in abstinence. The 1968 building’s structural core, which remains sound, will be kept intact — interior walls still stand, displaying weathered Soviet mosaics with ideological imagery that was once ubiquitous across the country. Curators can choose to hang artworks on the original walls, but hinged panels that drop from the ceiling with all-white walls can create the effect of a traditional gallery space. There will also be event spaces, screening rooms, and a café decorated with restored Soviet-era furniture.
The building’s original façades have crumbled, so OMA and Koolhaas designed double-thickness polycarbonate shell to sheath interior spaces and contain service infrastructure. The translucent silver-grey exterior panels will be lifted off the ground to connect the museum’s interior with the surrounding park, and two 36-foot-wide panels will slide vertically to reveal the atrium, a double-height space where especially large works can be displayed. Koolhaas’s interventions supplement what the building lost while it languished in disrepair and organize the ruin into an interior space that meets Garage’s programmatic needs. Yet preservation is the design’s generative force — while vestiges of Soviet architecture often go unappreciated and destroyed in contemporary Russia, Garage and Koolhaas insist that history must be acknowledged and addressed, not ignored. “For 70 years Russia destroyed various histories,” said Garage director Anton Belov, “and it would be a mistake to destroy this relic of the Soviet Union. It’s a unique piece of architecture, and you should treat it as such.”
The Garage building sets an example for dealing with the architectural past at a moment when historic architecture faces extreme threats in Moscow. This past summer alone, two of the city’s most significant Constructivist landmarks faced demolition and botched renovations. In late spring, real estate developers nearly succeeded in winning a permit to dismantle the 1922 Shukhov Tower, a latticed steel radio tower and the first of its kind. A small group of preservation activists rallied to save the iconic structure, and Garage organized public visits to the tower to highlight its historic significance. The city council granted landmark designation to the tower last month, just as another structure, the famed circular 1929 Melnikov House, was seized by the Russian state from its resident, the architect’s granddaughter. The State Architecture Museum plans to open the home as a public museum before the end of 2014; local critics have raised concerns about the legality of the granddaughter’s snap eviction and it remains unclear how the significant preservation efforts needed to properly restore the home can be completed in so short a time. Public outcries against the defacement and destruction of Soviet architectural patrimony are growing, thanks in no small part to prominent institutions like Garage, which fuel discussion about aesthetics, culture, and history.
“Education is the main element in all our processes,” said Belov. To that end, the museum’s OMA building is equipped with substantial education resources that include classrooms and conference spaces. For Belov, the structure, like the art it will eventually display, serves this higher purpose: “It’s not only about the construction of our building. It’s about the construction of society — thinking people, professionals, lovers of contemporary art.”
