GARAGE Pavilion
The first Exhibition Pavilion for the Garage Center of Contemporary Culture in Gorky Park was built to host different exhibitions and consists of six box-like volumes. The boxes are wrapped with a semi-transparent net and are connected with a series of interior courtyards.
'Garage', founded by Dasha Zhukova in 2008, is a major arts project based in Moscow, dedicated to exploring and developing contemporary culture.
At the beginning of 2012, Garage moved from its original home in the Bakhmetevsky Bus Garage to Gorky Park in Moscow where it got a new building by OMA in 2015, preceded by a pavilion by Shigeru Ban.
The new pavilion is in a way an architectural homage to the Hexahedron - classical Soviet pavilion by Ivan Zholtovsky which is situated 100 m away from the new structure.
The new structure is a sequence of 6 white cubes carefully placed between the existing trees and bushes in the park in order to fit in to the landscape and preserve all the greenery on the site. The cubes are connected with several semi-outdoor courtyards thus a visitor has to go in and out everytime he enters the next space.
Rectangular geometry of the exhibition cubes is wrapped with soft, double-curved surfaces of the exterior skin - translucent white net. Layers of net blur the shape of the pavilion and create 'moiré' effect. Acting as a diffusion layer, the net transforms the image of the pavilion: the structure looks more opaque or more transparent, depending on the angle.
The material of the buildings' skin represents the impermanence of the pavilion. Usage of 'debris netting' (which is used for covering the construction sites) shows the ephemeral verge between the construction and demolition of the new pavilion.
The interior of the pavilion was transformed several times during the exhibition "Factory of Michel Gondry" and due to its' white cube appearance has served as a neutral background for a series of different interventions.
Pavilion received ‘ArchiWood-2013’ award, prize for The best public building built in wood.
