Courtesy of OMAA rendering of the new facility for the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, scheduled to open in 2015.

The Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, the nonprofit art center opened in Moscow in 2008 by the collector Dasha Zhukova, has decided to transform itself into a museum, a change that will initially involve only its name but that the institution hopes will signal its intention to become a permanent part of Russia’s rapidly expanding art world.

The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, as it will be known on May 1, was first located in a Constructivist-era landmark bus garage near the Olympic Stadium. It is now in a temporary structure designed by Shigeru Ban, the Japanese architect who won the Pritzker Architecture Prize this week, and it is awaiting a move in 2015 to a permanent home, a derelict restaurant building in Gorky Park being redesigned by the architect Rem Koolhaas.

Jonathan Worth for The New York TimesDasha Zhukova in 2008.

Kate Fowle, the Garage’s chief curator, said the decision to become a museum – though a noncollecting one, like the New Museum for Contemporary Art in New York – would have practical implications, such as easing art-loan agreements and allowing the institution to join professional groups like the International Council of Museums. But more than that, she said, the change is intended to signal to Russian audiences that the Garage wants to be taken seriously as an art destination.

“If you say you’re a center for contemporary culture, it’s not quite clear to the public what that means,” Ms. Fowle said. “If you say the word institution it sounds very Soviet and no one wanted that. We needed to reflect to the public a sense of permanence, and we think this will go a long way toward doing that.”

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