Plans for Marina Abramović’s OMA-designed Marina Abramović Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art (MAI) were revealed yesterday at the Marina Abramović Breakfast, hosted at MoMA PS1. Since then, it’s been all things Marina on the internets, with every architecture and design blog commenting on the peculiar spaces and bizarro programs that will fill out the center, to be located in an abandoned 20,000 square foot theater in Hudson, New York. When the project was announced last winter, as much chatter was devoted to the artist’s surprising partnership with Rem Koolhaas’ OMA (the smiling couple, seen here) as was to Abramović’s fanciful  talk about hour-long performance pieces to be held within the new facilities.

Under the direction of OMA-partner Shohei Shigematsu, the project has since developed into an intricate interior scheme with plans to insert a new programmatic box containing the central performance space, with room for 650 attendees–each of which, according to Abramović, will have to don whit lab coats and sign a contract to ensure they remain on the premises and observant for no less than 6 hours.

Tucked discreetly behind the theater’s brick exterior and an erstwhile colonnaded entry, the volume will be encircled by a series of rooms of various functions. There will be a library and classrooms, but, more spectacularly, a levitation room, a digital temple, a crystal room, a quartz resting room, and, perhaps most useful, a sleep chamber. Cue laughter.

All of these room are to be visually connected to the central stage, so as to promote diversionary relief from the possibly “quite boring”–in Shigematsu’s own words–performances. Shigematsu compared the venue’s spatial dynamic to that of a baseball stadium, wherein the main spectacle is a stuffy, if precise affair, too long and too far at a remove to sustain prolonged engagement: “What’s interesting is that it’s so long that you can watch the game while you’re doing something else.”

OMA  will also design the venue’s lighting and furniture, the latter being tooled and fitted with wheels so that reclining visitors can be rolled  from one room to another and up/down the spiral lamp that  will connect the educational facilities to the rooftop cafe. Abramović hopes to open MAI by 2012, but  first has to raise the $15 million to fund construction. Let the art/fundraising parties begin!

All images: OMA

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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.

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Performance artist Marina Abramović has only two rules for house guests at Chez Abramović: (a) you can’t stay longer than three nights, and (b) you have to sleep on this “uncomfortable daybed.” Conceptual provocation, or insurance against long-term crashers? Someone get Jerry Saltz on the horn.

Abramović listed the daybed’s current home — the SoHo loft she bought in 2001 for $1.5 million — for $3.5 million today. Our friends over at Curbed write that the Serbian artist hired Dennis Wedlick to design the interiors. Wedlick collected all of the loft’s services and storage areas into a single pastel-clad core, leaving the rest of the loft spare and uncluttered. It’s a surprisingly colorful, domestic treatment. Click through for more images.

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