Dasha Zhukova’s New Real Estate Venture

The future of museum-going and cultural forays could be down in your own lobby, according to Dasha Zhukova, the arts patron and philanthropist who is launching a new residential real estate development firm in New York.

Ray, the name of Zhukova’s new brand, sets out to remedy a blind spot she sees in the residential world: the lack of arts and culture experiences in urban developments. Where other buildings and “co-living” spaces offer perks like golf simulators and dog grooming services, Ray’s buildings will offer cultural programming like master classes, events and workshops drawn from local institutions and artists to encourage creative synergy, says Zhukova, 39, with rents pegged at or below market rate.

One of the venture’s projects is reimagining Harlem’s three-story National Black Theatre, founded in 1968 by the late Barbara Ann Teer on the corner of 125th Street and Fifth Avenue, and is set to break ground by the end of May. A 21-storey building will take its place, with the new theatre space, retail and an event space spread across the first four floors, which Ray is developing with L+M Development Partners. The final structure will include 222 apartments, as well as artist studios, co-working spaces, communal kitchens, a library and a wellness space, and is slated to be completed in 2024.

Teer’s daughter, Sade Lythcott, now leads the theatre. “This project and partnership has felt [like] kismet from the time Dasha and I first met in 2019, not around aesthetics or Ray’s business model, but around our mothers. What it has meant to be women, raised by fearless matriarchs,” Lythcott wrote by email. “There is an incredible amount of equity created when you first start from a place that recognizes our shared humanity, honours what came before, in service of creating the built spaces of the future.”

Zhukova was inspired to launch Ray after seeing how visitors were drawn to the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, the Moscow museum she co-founded in 2008. Its current home was designed by acclaimed architect Rem Koolhaas. “Even if [visitors] had seen all the shows that we had on, they would just stay and hang out in our lobby,” she says. “They would hang out in our cafe for hours on end—just come back day after day because they wanted to be in that environment.”

While hotels such as New York’s Gramercy Park Hotel have showcased art collections including names like Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and developers have often staged high-end homes with trendy art to help sweeten the blue-chip price tags, one of Ray’s rental buildings will boast a permanent installation by Rashid Johnson, whose work just fetched a record US$1.95 million at Christie’s on May 11. Johnson will be creating a plant-filled installation for the lobby of a 110-unit building in Philadelphia’s rising Fishtown neighbourhood, which also will have six street-level artist studios, as well as maker spaces, and will be completed in 2022.

“Access to art shouldn’t be for a privileged few,” Johnson wrote by email. “These art and living spaces are aiming to bridge some of this gap, for me that’s exciting.”

The first two Ray ventures in Philadelphia and Harlem are largely financed by Zhukova. Ray recently inked a third deal, in Miami, where the site will expand beyond the 250-plus unit rental building that will anchor it, says Zhukova, with future plans for retail, offices, landscaped walkways and single- and multi-family homes.) With each project, Ray will emphasize new buildings rather than retrofitting existing space: “To truly rethink the space and how we occupy it…you really need to rebuild,” says Zhukova, who is looking to make inventive use of materials and space in part to make up for areas where Ray is spending more freely. “The focus [is] on how our habits have changed, the technological innovation and the cultural change.”

Her team at Ray currently eschews traditional titles—Zhukova calls her colleagues “thought partners”—and includes Will Kluczkowski, a real estate veteran from DDG; Becca Goldstein, a Stanford MBA whose CV includes a stint at a Brooklyn-based whisky distillery; and the design gallerist Suzanne Demisch.

“We are looking for creative solutions,” says Demisch, who says she enjoys the challenge posed by a limited budget. “We are asking why. There’s not a package for all the touchpoints of the experience—it’s about the aesthetic and the culture of each location.” Months were spent developing and perfecting the hand-split bricks for the facade of the Philadelphia project with manufacturers Glen-Gery and architecture firm Leong Leong—and finding the perfect Pantone swatch for the pinkish hue of the Harlem building facade, which is a nod to the historic Nigerian site the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove.

Such historic references were a priority of the architect of Ray’s Harlem project, Frida Escobedo, who is based in Mexico City. Art panels, inscriptions and a geometric, rhythmic facade that echo the motifs of the original National Black Theatre all refer to its previous incarnation, but “we’re also putting a great deal of focus on communal spaces, such as the artist studio and constellation of gathering areas,” says Escobedo, who is collaborating on the interiors with designer Little Wing Lee of Studio & Projects.

Zhukova, meanwhile, is partnering with Artspace, the Minneapolis-based nonprofit developer of art spaces, which will receive funding from the Ford Foundation in order to provide housing and studios at the Harlem building. She hopes to do the same in all Ray buildings. Her goal is to create accessible rents that will allow artists to remain in their home neighbourhoods rather than fleeing cities for more affordable live/work options. Zhukova next has her eye on rising cities including Austin, Nashville, Denver and Portland, Oregon, where she says they will focus on neighbourhoods that are a cultural fit for the brand.

“My personal dream is to build in Arizona,” says Zhukova. “I think in that climate and given the less restrictive building codes, you could build something absolutely incredible.”

A wave of corporate warnings and technical disclosures has flooded the media, with headlines worrying over “swarms” of rogue artificial-intelligence agents launching “unprecedented” cyberattacks, outsmarting their makers, and inching toward a terrifying autonomy. The most revealing part of this narrative isn’t what the software did. It’s who is telling the story—and why. When corporate leaders publicly insist that the systems they financed, engineered and deployed are suddenly beyond their power to contain, skepticism isn’t only healthy; it is essential.

For years, Silicon Valley has drawn scrutiny from civil society and global regulators over tangible harms such as youth mental health deterioration and systematic privacy violations. Today, industry figures seem to be trying to change that public image. Loudly blowing the whistle on their own systems—just as two of the leading companies were preparing for massive initial public offerings—lets AI executives position themselves as a new generation of leaders who have come to terms with their societal responsibilities. They seem to want us to believe that they no longer want to “move fast and break things” but will instead stand as vigilant guardians between humanity and a technological apocalypse.

There is one glaring problem: Software doesn’t rebel. A mathematical model possesses neither intent, malice nor the will to defy its creators, let alone extinguish our species. AI is a human artifact, engineered for profit.

When an agentic model in an evaluation sandbox connects to an unauthorized server or executes an exploit, it hasn’t staged a coup. It has tried to meet the human-defined objectives set out before it through a path its designers failed to constrain. It’s the digital equivalent of the King Midas myth, in which the king’s ill-defined wish turns even his food and drink into gold.

That powerful experimental models were able to discover novel vulnerabilities and breach external systems isn’t a sign of a dangerous superintelligence but of human error or negligence. There is no sentient actor lurking in the weights to be reasoned with, feared or pacified. There are only human software engineers, product managers and corporate boards deciding which guardrails are worth the latency cost and which permissions can be skipped in the race to market.

Policymakers and voters need to resist AI exceptionalism. In any other discipline—from civil engineering to pharmaceuticals—courts and regulators treat a system failure as evidence of bad product design and inadequate safety testing. If an aircraft crashes, we focus on finding the engineering defect, correcting it, and enforcing established liability standards for the damage created.

By leaning on an anthropomorphic narrative, Silicon Valley attempts to repackage its specific human choices that led to experimental, powerful models behaving unexpectedly during tests as an existential peril. Elevating the issue to a cosmic scale leaves the public paralyzed and takes ordinary product accountability off the table.

In the cutthroat race for venture capital and market dominance, building guardrails slows down deployment. Grandstanding about uncontrollable power costs nothing and generates billions of dollars in free publicity, justifying stock prices, all while cultivating an aura of technological capability not only to build the frontier but also ultimately to rein it in.

Governments need to recognize regulatory capture when it stares them in the face. Tech leaders’ strategy looks transparent: Alarm Washington and Brussels into creating a regime in which only trillion-dollar incumbents with fully staffed compliance and safety departments can legally operate. By sitting at the policymakers’ tables before anyone else, these companies can help draft rules digging an impassable moat protecting them from open-source developers and upstart competitors, domestic or international. The real danger is in further concentrating the tech industry into the hands of only a few companies with deep pockets.

Beijing and Washington have brushed off those tech leaders’ calls, albeit for very different reasons. Chinese state media dismissed them as part of the “Cold War playbook” and intended to preserve U.S. dominance. Xi Jinping argued for exactly the opposite at the Brics Summit on Sept. 12, calling on Brics countries to “strengthen cooperation in the field of AI, encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing, and break new grounds and scale new heights.” President Trump, steeped in a doctrine of unfettered capitalism and technological supremacy, called fears that AI could destroy humanity a “hoax.” Vice President JD Vance warned that AI companies “begging the government to regulate them” looked like a “Trojan Horse.”

Striving to pursue its “European way” on AI and assert regulatory leadership, Europe, by contrast, welcomed the call. European Union President Ursula von der Leyen made this clear at the State of the EU speech last Wednesday and announced that the EU will invite “the main frontier labs for a discussion on how we can support ongoing industry efforts to pace the frontier.”

Europe has been here before. In an effort to lead global regulation and react to fears borne from ChatGPT, Europe rushed its landmark AI Act into law in 2024. Already the world’s most restrictive rulebook, the framework quickly proved too broad and complex to enforce. Stalled by implementation delays and concerns about European competitiveness, the EU postponed the law’s full rollout, leaving regulations uncertain.

AI should be regulated—risks exist and should be taken seriously. But governments need to act based on available evidence and verified facts, not corporate PR panic, the views of industry insiders, or the desire for quick political wins. The greatest danger facing society isn’t that software will awaken and overthrow its human masters. It is that we will allow the creators of the software to abdicate human responsibility for the systems they choose to build and help them pull up the ladder to market access behind them.

Dasha Zhukova’s New Real Estate Venture

Ray, makes It ‘night at the museum’ every night.

AI doesn’t rebel—people design, deploy and profit from it. The real danger lies in allowing tech companies to escape accountability while shaping regulations that protect their dominance.