Designed by OMA, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art is a renovation of the 1960s Vremena Goda (Seasons of the Year) restaurant, a prefabricated concrete pavilion which has been derelict for more than two decades. OMA’s design for the 5,400 m2 building includes exhibition galleries on two levels, a creative center for children, shop, cafe?, auditorium, offices, and roof terrace. The design preserves original Soviet-era elements, including a mosaic wall, tiles, and brick, while incorporating a range of innovative architectural and curatorial devices.

Garage Museum of Contemporary Art was founded in 2008 at the Konstantin Melnikov designed Bakhmetievsky Bus Garage. Relocating from a semi-industrial neighborhood in the north of Moscow to one of the city’s best known public spaces (Gorky Park), Garage will address a much larger and diversified audience.
Exposed to snow, rain, and sun since it was abandoned in the 1990s, the former Vremena Goda restaurant ? once a popular destination in Gorky Park ? has become a ruin without facades. Even as a ruin it preserves the “collective” aura of the Soviet era: it is a sober public space adorned with tiles, mosaics, and bricks.

The building offers two levels of unobstructed open space that will be dedicated to exhibitions, organized around two circulation and service cores. museum programs occupy three levels, adapting to spatial and structural possibilities of the existing structure. The more fragmented spaces in...