The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art is reviving one of Moscow’s most iconic Soviet structures, the long-neglected Hexagon pavilion, as part of the museum’s push to restore Gorky Park as the city’s cultural center.
By saving these buildings, Garage is building out a formidable campus. But the museum is also building a link to 20th-century modernist ideas in architecture that have long been at risk due to disrepair in the late Soviet period, or demolition in the incredible growth since then.
Moscow’s Hexagon has had as many lives as it has facets. First built by the Soviet architect Ivan Zholtovsky in 1923 for a national agricultural fair, the Hexagon, or Machine Pavilion, served as the fair’s expo hall for mechanical engineering. This series of six linked buildings was the only reinforced concrete structure made for the fair and the only one to survive. The Hexagon went on to host the Soviet Union’s first international auto show in 1925 as well as a survey of Moscow painting and sculpture in 1929. Over time it was used as a kitchen, beer garden, popular disco, cinema and lemonade factory.
After a series of fires in the 1970s and ‘80s, the Hexagon fell into disrepair, like much of surrounding Gorky Park. Designed by the Russian architect Konstantin Melnikov, Gorky Central Park of Culture and Leisure was at the heart of Moscow’s efforts to build a vision for the future of socialist cities in the 1920s. Despite its enviable location, just down the Moskva River from the central Kitay-gorod area and Red Square, Gorky Park was a desolate place by the end of the century.
Over the last 15 years, however, the park’s fortunes have turned around. That’s in part the work of some wealthy contemporary art enthusiasts: Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich and Garage co-founder Dasha Zhukova, who first opened the museum in a bus garage in 2008, invested heavily in Gorky Park. Abramovich bought the Hexagon as well as another famous yet disused Soviet landmark, the Vremena Goda restaurant (“Seasons of the Year”), in 2013 for 433 million rubles ($5.8 million today). The Dutch firm OMA led the rehab of the vast 1968 restaurant, which now serves as Garage’s main building.
Light in the Hexagon’s central courtyard streams through an oculus to a gallery space in the atrium below. Courtesy of SANAA/Garage Museum of Contemporary Art
Japan’s Pritzker Prize-winning architecture firm SANAA will rehabilitate the Hexagon. The plan involves reconstructing or renovating the six individual buildings, or facets, that make up the Hexagon. These facets will be double-height spaces. A shared, single-story super-structure running along the perimeter will connect the six facets, creating gallery and passage space around and between the structures. The double-height facets will open onto an elevated central courtyard, creating a new public space for Muscovites. This courtyard also covers an atrium accessible from the lower level.
With gallery exhibition areas as well as a library, a store and a cafe, the project will add more than 102,000 square feet of space to the Garage museum campus.
While Garage is a platform for cutting-edge contemporary art, the museum has worked to shore up the avant-garde architecture of yesteryear. Igor Vinogradsky, who designed the Seasons restaurant now occupied by Garage, also built socialist modernist housing blocks that are largely forgotten as important works of 20th-century design. Zholtovsky, a neoclassical architect who was perhaps more influential as a mentor and administrator to other Soviet architects than as a designer himself, is still represented today by projects on Mokhovaya Street and Patriarch’s Pond. But the Hexagon may be his most distinguished and most modern project.
Gorky Park itself is an example of a modern project that was nearly a ruin just 20 years ago: Part of Melnikov’s legacy was at risk of being lost with the park. Garage isn’t restoring the park as it once looked, however, or preserving the buildings as they once existed. OMA took liberties with Vinogradsky’s restaurant, and SANAA is adding substantially to Zholtovsky’s forum. It would be fairer to say that the museum is adapting these buildings — if not preserving them precisely, then giving them a new face.
