The Project
In 2007-2010, we carried out a series of building interventions to enable the newly established Garage Museum of Contemporary Art to accommodate major international art exhibitions at their first home, Konstantin Melnikov’s 1927 Bakhmetevsky bus garage in Moscow .
Within the vast historic building, we created new, environmentally controlled galleries to allow the Garage to bring international loans of museum standard to the Moscow audience for the first time.
To create a complete museum experience for the visitor, new and accessible facilities were also added, including a welcome desk, WCs, a cafe and a bookshop.
The main gallery, a building within a building, was located under three of the existing roof lights. These interlocking roof lights have an extraordinary form, but through the filigree of the structure it is very hard to perceive. In subtle and elegant homage to the masterpiece in which it sits, the interior ceiling of the new gallery appropriated the form and dimensions of the existing roof lights, allowing the gallery to benefit from daylight.
The remainder of the vast and dramatic interior space of the original building was used for the installation of large-scale sculptural works.
Historic Fabric
Built in 1927, the Bakhmetevsky Bus Garage was designed by Constructivist architect, Konstantin Melnikov, and Structural Engineer, Vladimir Shukhov. The vast interior, a single parallelogram of 8,500msq, was designed to accommodate 104 public service buses. After some years of decay, the building was restored in 2006, in readiness for JFA's development of the building into a museum space.