The spacecraft has landed!

This will be the new State Hermitage/Guggenheim museum in Vilnius. Don't ask me how they got a Russian museum and an American foundation to collaborate, but sometimes it happens...

The design is by the world famous Iraqi (omigod, it gets worse, Russian, American, Iraqi) architect Zaha Hadid. Generally I like her designs. It's certainly daring - and has no relation to Vilnius' old town, though not much of that particular location does.

Not entirely sure how exactly it will fit in, given that in that location, and missing in the picture, is also the 21 story Lietuva Reval hotel in front of it, the Central Shopping Centre even closer to us, a half-started museum on the right, Mother Lithuania with some doves beside it, a huge new sports palace further over to the right, and it's sitting right on my jogging track....Maybe they'll squeeze it in on the bit of land between the road and the river....as long as the river won't ever flood.

Awaiting it with interest. Wonder what the other two designs were like (by Libeskind, and Massimiliano Fuksas).