Garage Screen

Location Moscow, Russia
Client Garage Museum of Contemporary Art
Year 2017 and 2018
Status Completed
Program Cultural
Team Ekaterina Golovatyuk
Giacomo Cantoni
Giuseppe Bandieramonte
Alessandro Gloria
Luca Putzolu
Surface 620 sqm

Garage Screen at Gorky Park is designed to accommodate Garage’s summer film program. Conceived as a temporary structure, the cinema can be assembled and disassembled every season. It consists of 3 main elements: an existing amphitheater, part of OMA’s design for the Square of Arts, a tent roof and a rectangular volume containing the screen. The fading pink-blue tent connects the screen and the existing concrete amphitheater, mediating their shapes and creating a spacious covered area for seating, while the floating facade reflects an ethereal image of the Garage Museum.

Temporary structures or pavilions, conceived as fast projects for specific events, have always encouraged ambitious experimentation, often blurring the boundary between an art installation and an architectural prototype.

The “All-Russian Agricultural and Handicraft” Exhibition in 1923 started a long-standing tradition of experiments with temporary architecture within the Gorky Park. The Soviet avant-garde pavilions by Konstantin Melnikov and other architects were conceived as manifestos of the new era. In the past 10 years, this tradition has been re-activated through the initiatives of Garage Museum.

Garage is a non-profit institution with an extensive program of exhibitions, screenings, concerts, festivals, education events, field-research programs and inclusive projects. These take place inside the main building “Vremena Goda, in the Education Center, as well as, on the Square of Arts.

This Square, part of OMA proposal for the open spaces surrounding the museum, is not only the location for site-specific projects commissioned to Russian and international artists, such as Viacheslav Koleichuk, Boris Matrosov and Damián Ortega, but also an outdoor platform for Garage’s educational programs with activities and workshops related to ongoing exhibitions.

Here, in 2018, GRACE designed the first temporary cinema for Garage’s summer film program. Launched in 2012, the program brings to Moscow the best films on art and culture.

GRACE’s project engages with the existing elements of the square, preserving the extensive use of the public space in front of the museum, which, since 2015, became one of the most popular spots within Gorky Park.

GRACE’s Garage Screen has been successfully re-assembled, and has also set the parameters for the new competition, targeted towards young Russian architects, to design the new 2019 edition of the temporary cinema.