Garage Gorky Park overview.
Photo: © Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). Courtesy OMA.

Dasha Zhukova has set a June 2015 grand opening date for her Garage Museum of Contemporary Art‘s new, Rem Koolhaas–designed home in Moscow. The building, in Gorky Park, is a former restaurant from the 1960s, Vremena Goda (“Seasons of the Year”), which has been abandoned for over 20 years. Koolhaas and his architecture firm Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) are overhauling the structure, a project that was originally due to be completed last year, but is now on track to open in mid-2015.

In an announcement on Monday, Koolhaas said: “We were able, with our client and her team, to explore the qualities of generosity, dimension, openness, and transparency of the Soviet wreckage and find new uses and interpretations for them; it also enabled us to avoid the exaggeration of standards and scale that is becoming an aspect of contemporary art spaces.”

The museum will feature a whopping 5,400 square meters (about 58,000 square feet) spread over two floors, with five exhibition galleries, an auditorium, education facilities, and more. A distinctive exterior of double-thickness translucent polycarbonate raised more than six feet off the ground will offer passersby an inviting glimpse into the museum.

Garage Gorky Park pavilion entrance.
Photo: © Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). Courtesy OMA.

The Garage Museum’s most dramatic architectural feature, the Garage Atrium, will feature a raise section of the polycarbonate sheath revealing large-scale works. The first such piece will be an enormous installation by Russian artist Eric Bulatov. Additional programming for the new building will include a large-scale project by Rirkrit Tiravanija. A few months later, in September 2015—while it also plays host to the Moscow Biennale—the Garage Museum will open the first retrospective of Louise Bourgeois ever held in Moscow, and co-organized Munich’s Haus der Kunst.

In the meantime, Garage will continue to operate its Garage Education Center and Garage Pavilion spaces, also in Gorky Park.