Moscow’s Garage Museum Is Reviving the City’s Famous Hexagon Pavilion

The Japanese design firm SANAA will restore the 1923 structure, a link to Russia’s architectural legacy that was on the brink of being lost. 

The Hexagon occupies pride of place in Gorky Park.

Courtesy of SANAA/Garage Museum of Contemporary Art

The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art is reviving one of Moscow’s most iconic Soviet structures, the long-neglected Hexagon pavilion, as part of the museum’s push to restore Gorky Park as the city’s cultural center.

By saving these buildings, Garage is building out a formidable campus. But the museum is also building a link to 20th-century modernist ideas in architecture that have long been at risk due to disrepair in the late Soviet period, or demolition in the incredible growth since then.