NORTH ADAMS, MA.- For his first major U.S. museum exhibition, Christoph Büchel will transform MASS MoCA’s football field-size gallery into an imagined temporary community housed in sea containers and trailers and including a playing field, a cinema, and more.

Due to logistical complexities encountered by the museum in preparing galleries for this vast installation, Training Ground for Democracy, the exhibition's official opening date -- tentatively set for December 16th -- will be re-scheduled for early 2007.

"While MASS MoCA is known for undertaking intricate and dramatically-scaled installations, this one is an order-of-magnitude more complex than anything we have attempted up to now, requiring, among other things, vast cement walls comprised of over 2 miles of cinder block, an immaculately detailed cinema, and thousands of specific found objects, some of which weigh over 20 tons" said MASS MoCA Director Joseph Thompson. "Because of these logistical challenges and some technical snags, the museum needs a bit more time to provide the support this extraordinary work deserves: we do not want to shortchange the quality of what promises to be a landmark work of art for lack of a few extra weeks."

The official opening date will be announced in early January 2007. In 2002, Büchel transformed the two-story New York gallery Maccarone Inc. into a series of cut up rooms by hacking through the floor, bisecting existing spaces, and installing an exterior roof to his installation on the top floor of the gallery. In his 2004 exhibition at the Swiss Institute in New York City, he divided an apartment with a concrete wall making it seem like the dwelling of two roommates who do not get along. Ken Johnson of the New York Times wrote of this exhibit, “the main excitement of Mr. Büchel's ingenious construction is the Alice-in-Wonderland feeling of entering a mysteriously eccentric and possibly nonsensical parallel universe."