Confirmed: Rem Koolhaas is Doing, Um, Something at the Hermitage

You might recall, on Tuesday, when we were reporting that Rem Koolhaas is back to working with the Hermitage. But we weren’t quite sure if he was just in talks with them again, as he had been early last year, or if he was actually going to be finally getting into the museum to rearrange some things and give the place a new coat of paint, so to speak. Luckily, we’ve gotten a quick answer, as Bloomberg is now reporting that the starchitect is going to be changing around some of the exhibits to begin with, then moving on from there. Well, again, just “sort of.” The catch in the whole thing is that he’s not allowed to make any changes to the building itself and not allowed to put anything new inside the museum. So you can see what he’s up against, particularly when you read things like this:

Koolhaas said he is counting on close cooperation with Hermitage Director Mikhail Piotrovsky, with whom he has “a nice personal engagement, a dialogue, you could say.”

Rem is a talented person with whom it’s interesting to work,” said Piotrovsky. “It’s not necessary to improve things at the Hermitage, because things are already great, but we shouldn’t stay in one place, and we shouldn’t be afraid to experiment.”

This sounds like either the worst job or the best ever, because, from what we’re reading, in the end, Koolhaas could just say, “Well, it took ten million dollars, but I’m finally done,” without ever having touched a thing. And the strange part is, they’d probably love his work. Our heads hurt.

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