Russian Garage Museum Of Contemporary Art Announces Reconstruction Of Hexagon Building

Russia's well-known Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow on Monday announced that its historical Hexagon building will be renovated by the Japanese architectural company SANAA (Sejima and Nishizawa and Associates).

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 22nd November, 2021) Russia's well-known Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow on Monday announced that its historical Hexagon building will be renovated by the Japanese architectural company SANAA (Sejima and Nishizawa and Associates).

"The Hexagon, originally designed by legendary Russian architect Ivan Zholtovsky, will be revived by SANAA's thoughtful and sensitive design, allowing Garage to ground itself in Russian history while expanding into the current global conversation. We want to ensure that our building reflects our ongoing inquiry into the function, purpose, and responsibility of the modern day museum," Dasha Zhukova, co-founder of Garage Museum of Contemporary Art said.

The Hexagon will join Garage Museum as an expanded series of galleries. The six buildings are linked by one-storeyed galleries to create a continuous enclosure surrounding a courtyard. The pavilion will house three exhibition galleries, a library, a bookstore, and a cafe. The architectural concept engages six principles: preserving original geometry and proportion, connected spaces, daylight in each pavilion, spatial organization, neoclassical outline, and a new landscape, emphasizing the geometry.

The Hexagon (formerly the Machines and Tools Pavilion) was built in 1923 by Russian architects Ivan Zholtovsky, Viktor Kokorin, and Mikhail Parusnikov for the First All-Russian Agricultural and Handicraft Industries Exhibition. Constructed from reinforced concrete, the Hexagon has served as a cafe, a restaurant, a discotheque, and a lemonade production site before it was abandoned. In 1999, Moscow City Government declared it a protected monument of garden and park design.

SANAA is a Japanese architectural firm founded in 1995 by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa. In 2010, the founders were awarded the Pritzker Architecture prize. Garage Museum of Contemporary Art was founded in 2008 by Dasha Zhukova and Roman Abramovich and was originally located in the building of the former Bakhmetevsky Bus Garage, which defined the museum`s name.