Guggenheim Hermitage Museum, Vilnius, Lithuania

Home to more than half a million people, Vilnius is Lithuania's capital and largest city. In 2009, the city will be a European Capital of Culture. The European Union gives this designation to certain cities for a year, enabling them to showcase their cultural assets, transform their cultural bases and improve the way the world perceives them.

The Vilnius government is determined to put the city on the world's cultural map. Founded in 1320, the city already features an impressive architectural heritage and history of art patronage. Now Vilnius has focused on increasing its contemporary cultural offerings. That transformation includes building the futuristic-looking Guggenheim Hermitage Museum, designed by 2004 Pritzker Prize-winning architect Zaha Hadid.

INTERNATIONAL DESIGN COMPETITION

In April 2008, Zaha Hadid Architects won an international competition to design this museum and cultural centre.

Hadid's concept bested the submissions of finalists Daniel Libeskind of Studio Daniel Libeskind and Massimiliano Fuksas of Studio Fuksas. The six-member jury included Lithuanian Prime Minister Gediminas Kirkilas, Guggenheim Director Thomas Krens and Hermitage Director Mikhail Piotrovsky.

A feasibility study in the summer of 2008 will examine various impacts of the project on the site and the local economy. By 2011, the museum should be ready to house a permanent collection of avant-garde works, particularly by two Lithuanian artists who came to prominence in New York City: Jonas Mekas, a filmmaker who has specialised in 'diarist cinema' and who established the Anthology Film Archives in New York, and Jurgis (George) Maciunas (1931–1978), founder of the 1960s art movement Fluxus. Both men blurred distinctions between art and life.

The museum will also present exhibitions of new media art and parts of the Anthology Film Archives, as well as pieces from the collections of the New York-based Solomon R Guggenheim Foundation and the St Petersburg-based State Hermitage Museum.

By some estimates, building the museum will cost up to 170 million Lithuanian litai (approximately £39m €49m).

Occupying a large, public area near the banks of the Neris River, the museum will be centrally located between the old and new centers of Vilnius. In contrast to nearby rectilinear skyscrapers, the museum will stretch out horizontally, featuring curvilinear forms.

ZAHA HADID

Born in Iraq in 1950, Hadid is a London-based architect known for attention-getting, amorphous, fluid shapes that evoke science fiction imagery, rather than referencing earlier architectural periods.

Architecture critic Witold Rybcynzki has called her designs unprogrammatic and has written, "This architecture is not a response to functional requirements, or construction methods, or site constraints, but seems driven, instead, by images of 'The Future': streamlined shapes, free-flowing forms, silhouettes that suggest an intergalactic space station."

GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM DESIGN

Her sculptural design for the Vilnius museum is in the same vein and has prompted comparisons to a UFO, an aerodynamic vehicle, a motorboat, an inverted high heel, a whale and a slug.

The metallic skin and the strong geometry of the windows (a combination of triangles and parallelograms) lend a decidedly futuristic feel to the museum concept. Indeed, the firm says that the design 'points towards a future architectural language' and embraces the 'latest digital design technology and digital fabrication methods'.

Hadid has won many international competitions, but few of her designs have been built. For instance, her proposed addition to the Louvre in Paris did not win a 2005 competition.

Other Hadid museum designs include the soon-to-be-built Eli and Edythe Broad Museum at Michigan State University (USA); the completed Ordrupgaard Museum Extension (Charlottenlund, Denmark); the Riverside Museum (currently under construction in Glasgow, Scotland); and the completed Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, Ohio (USA).