Last 12th June, Lithuania approved the project for the new museum of the capital city Vilnius (nominated European capital of culture for 2009), realized in collaboration with two great international realities: the Guggenheim Museum and the Hermitage Museum of Saint Petersburg.
It is estimated that the project will cost 117 million dollars, 15% of which will be funded by the Lithuanian government. The date scheduled for its realization is 2011. According to previsions, more than 400,000 visitors are expected every year.
The museum will be called Vilnius Guggenheim Hermitage Museum using the double brand of its two promoting institutions. Inside, it will host works of new media art and realizations belonging to the Fluxus movement, emerged in New York in the sixties and led by Lithuanian-born artist Jurgis Mačiūnas. Another important part of the collection will be represented by the works by Jonas Mekas, Lithuanian avant-garde director whose works are currently kept at the Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center. Furthermore, there will be works from the two founding museums, the Hermitage Museum and the Guggenheim Museum.
At the moment a feasibility study is being carried out in order to assess the various aspects of the project’s implementation, including economic and market impact analyses.
The planning of the museum has been assigned to Zaha Hadid, winner of the international competition organized to choose the architect. Other proposals had been presented by Massimiliano Fuksas and Daniel Libeskind (winner of the competition to rebuild the World Trade Center).
The members of the commission that chose the project were the director of the Hermitage Museum Mikhail Piotrovsky, the director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Thomas Krens, the director of the Frankfurt’s Museum of Architecture Peter Schmal, and the vice-president of the Lithuanian Union of Architects Gintaras Čaikauskas. Also Lithuanian prime minister Gediminas Kirkilas and Vilnius mayor Juozas Imbrasas took part in the decision-making process. All three projects presented were exposed at the Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center of Vilnius.
Zaha Hadid, architect of Iranian origins who lives and works in England, was the first woman to win the prestigious Pritzker Prize, the “Nobel prize” for architecture. For over thirty years, her studio has been a study and experiment centre in the fields of town planning, architecture and design. “I am happy to work in Vilnius on the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum” claims Hadid. “The city will be the European Capital of Culture in 2009 and has a long history of art preservation. With a similar attention towards art, Vilnius will continue developing as a cultural centre where the relation between culture and public life is delicate. This museum will be a place where it will be possible to try out, with the idea of the galleries, the complexity of Space and Movement”.

The project presented by Zaha Hadid will aim at the contrast between the horizontal form of the building’s soft lines and the verticality of the directional centre of Vilnius and the nearby skyscrapers that frame the area where the museum will rise. It is a complex that brings together within it the idea of fluidity, speed and lightness. An object made of mystic and floating forms that seems to challenge gravity.

The design of the museum is the fruit of a new architectonic language, part of an innovative research line of Zaha Hadid Architects, which embraces the most recent technology of digital planning and building. This advanced technology allows to transfer in concrete the project forms delicately smoothed and modulated according to Hadid’s idea of fluidity, speed and lightness.

(translated by Giorgina Arcuri)