Hermitage Guggenheim Museum Vilnius

Award-winning competition work with Zaha Hadid

The Guggenheim Foundation and the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg intend to present the works from their collections in Europe in a new building. In 2008, Zaha Hadid won the competition for the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum in Vilnius, Lithuania. The concept for the museum is based on the ideas of fluidity, velocity and lightness. The extensive green areas surrounding the museum underline the sculptural quality of the building. In its treatment of Jonas Mekas, whose work will be shown in the museum, the multimedia concept aims to capture aspects that are placed in a fruitful, intensively charged relationship with architecture in general and the work of Zaha Hadid in particular. checkpointmedia has thus created a multimedia layer which interacts with the building, the contents, and the visitors and their movement within the space. Monitor screens in a variety of special forms are integrated into walls, ceilings, and floors and show material from the Fluxus art movement. The central part of the museum is recessed like a "canyon"; here multimedia effects respond directly to visitors' movements. "Sunspots", projections and monitors in the form of perforations in the roof and façade, run through the building as a leitmotif, representing the Fluxus principle of fusing together (private) interior and (public) exterior spaces. In the outside area, LED-generated "moonspots" take up the idea and reflect back the sunspots at night.