Rem Koolhaas to Design Marina Abramović’s $8M Performing Arts Center

Architizer News

Rem Koolhaas to Design Marina Abramović’s $8M Performing Arts Center

February 16, 2012

Photo: Billy Farrell Agency

Behold the smiling (I think?) faces of the next art and architecture power duo, Rem Koolhaas and Marina Abramović. As we learned recently from New York Magazine, the performance art maven who recently rocked the world by sitting motionless in the MoMA for 700 hours is reported to have purchased a former tennis center in Hudson, New York four years ago with the intent of turning it into a performance art center. Now, Abramović is teaming up with Dutch architecture icon Rem Koolhaas to make her dream into a reality. Earlier this week, the architect signed a deal to design and construct the Center for the Preservation of Performance Art, and now Abramović will begin phase 2 of the project: raising the $8 million needed to pay for the Center.

Though definitely not the first reputable fine arts institution to land in the Hudson, Abramović’s vision is a complex one. The artist imagines wholly interactive environments, an aggressive blurring of visitor and participant states. She is also advocating the construction of a hotel in the area specifically for those who make the 2-hour Hajj to the Hudson area from New York for the sake of art. How Koolhaas intends to complement Abramović’s edgy vision remains to be seen.