Garage Museum of Contemporary Art
OMA / Rem Koolhaas · Moscow, Russia · 2015
OMA converted the derelict 1968 Vremena Goda restaurant into Garage Museum while deliberately preserving traces of its Soviet-era structure and finishes. A new translucent polycarbonate envelope wraps the existing concrete frame, while movable walls and large exhibition volumes create flexible contemporary galleries inside. Rather than erase the original building, the conversion makes layers of use and decay part of the museum’s identity. Opened in 2015, Garage is an influential adaptive-reuse project showing how a relatively ordinary late-modern structure can be transformed into a major cultural institution.