Garage Gorky Park: Regenerating Moscow, But Will the Avant-Garde Be Back? |

Announced a few weeks ago, the renovation of the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow and its move to Gorky Park has taken centre stage in the architecture section of many design magazines and publications.

Founded by Russian socialite Dasha Zhukova in 2008 this non-profit arts project based in Moscow's Bakhmetevsky Bus Garage, a building designed in 1926 by Constructivist architect Konstantin Melnikov, will move from early next year to Gorky Park occupying the former Vremena Goda (Four Seasons) restaurant. The latter, a 5,400 square meter prefabricated concrete structure building designed by Melnikov and built in the 1960s, was abandoned since the 1990s.

Designed by OMA and due to be completed in 2013, Garage Gorky Park will have two levels of exhibition galleries, a cafe, bookshop, education facilities including a creative centre for children, mediatheque and auditorium.

According to the OMA site, the design will preserve original Soviet-era elements – including mosaics, and decorative tiles and bricks – while incorporating at the same time a range of innovative architectural and curatorial devices. For the occasion OMA will be working with Russian practice Form Bureau.

There will also be a second phase in this project during which the Garage will expand to the Hexagonal Pavilion designed in 1923 by architects Ivan Zholtovsky, Mikhail Parusnikov and Viktor Kokorin for the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition, and later used as an exhibition space for Soviet artists and as a cafe. Both the buildings – the Garage and the Hexahedron – will feature art programs.

Planned in the '20s by among others, Melnikov, and opened in 1928, Gorky Park has been going through a major renovation and regeneration project since last year and now it often hosts open-air music, film and sport events.

The Four Seasons is OMA’s first building project in Russia and its co-founder Rem Koolhaas, who is also a director at Strelka, a high-profile Institute for Architecture, Media and Urban Design School, and has been in love with Moscow since he first visited it in 1967, seems to be genuinely interested in the Garage project.

The main hope behind this project is apparently turning Moscow once again into an international contemporary art hub, but, considering the people involved, you instantly start wondering about the real aims behind such a plan.

The daughter of a Russian businessman, oil-magnate and illegal arms dealer and the girlfriend of businessman Roman Abramovich, Zhukova has the financial resources to achieve such a plan, though it is perfectly understandable to maybe raise doubts about the final aims and results of this venture.

Zhukova seems to be full of good intentions, hoping to forge with her projects Russia’s new identity, yet you wonder if choosing OMA was the consequence of a proper architectural research or a trendy choice dictated by Koolhaas’ links with Prada and the possibility of therefore being able to attract through it powerful fashion brands rather than just talented artists (first Russian Prada catwalk show anybody?).

So far Zhukova’s Garage (and the eponymous magazine connected to it…) has managed to bring over to Moscow the same selection of artists favoured by fashion and art foundations such as Venice's Palazzo Grassi (François-Henri Pinault) and the Fondazione Prada.

While from the pages of magazines and online publications Zhukova reassures the new Garage will be a place where everyone can engage in arts, it is only natural to wonder if this major project will then turn out into the toy of the rich and wealthy ones, a financial elite keen on Damien Hirst’s sparkling skulls and formaldehyde animals, Koons’s inflatable toys and Prada's arty toy boy Vezzoli’s glittery tears.

Moscow has undoubtedly got a great potential and if you spent one hour with some of the local talented artists, fashion designers, creative minds and radical situationists (think about Putin’s opponents and the people who, to protest against him, have been organising street theatres and open-air lectures and film screenings), you would easily realise the rich and wealthy are actually part of an obnoxious and falsely glamorous minority of people.

Will Zhukova's connections with fashion alienate visitors and annihilate her good intentions or will she manage to help local avant-garde artists and designers to emerge as well?

Time will tell, but now we finally know that whenever Abramovich's monster yacht is moored near Venice's Biennale Gardens, it isn't just there to display its grandeur to the locals and the tourists, it’s there on an art and architecture shopping spree.

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