Garage Center for Contemporary Culture

Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (Музей современного искусства «Гараж») occupies a Soviet modernist restaurant in Gorky Park, rebuilt by Rem Koolhaas and OMA. The 1968 Vremena Goda (Seasons of the Year) restaurant was stripped back rather than demolished. Its concrete frame, brickwork and an original mosaic remain visible behind a translucent polycarbonate facade that lifts at the base to draw visitors in from the park.

The museum does not centre on a permanent display. Instead it shows a changing programme of exhibitions of Russian and international contemporary art, alongside talks, film screenings and a substantial education programme. It also houses a public library on contemporary art and an archive documenting Russian art since the mid-twentieth century.

Garage was founded in 2008 by Dasha Zhukova and Roman Abramovich as the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture. Its first home was Konstantin Melnikov's 1920s Bakhmetevsky Bus Garage, which gave the institution its name. After a period in a temporary pavilion by Shigeru Ban, it opened in its current building in 2015 and now draws close to 900,000 visitors a year.