April 9 (Bloomberg) -- Zaha Hadid won a competition to design a museum in Vilnius, Lithuania, that may partly serve as an exhibition space for the New York-based Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and the St. Petersburg-based State Hermitage Museum, the museums said today.

The U.K.-based, Iraqi-born architect beat Daniel Libeskind of the U.S. and Italy's Massimiliano Fuksas. The six-person jury included Hermitage Director Mikhail Piotrovsky, Guggenheim Director Thomas Krens and Lithuanian Prime Minister Gediminas Kirkilas.

Hadid won the 2004 Pritzker Prize, an annual award considered the Nobel Prize for architecture.

``Lithuania has set its sights on becoming a premier international center of art,'' said Kirkilas in an e-mailed statement. ``We can think of no better institutions than the State Hermitage and the Guggenheim Foundation to help guide us in this project.''

A joint Guggenheim-Hermitage team will complete a feasibility study for the proposed museum by summer, and, if plans are approved, it will open by 2011, said the Guggenheim in the statement. Between 300,000 and 400,000 visitors are expected each year, it said.

The museum will get Lithuanian state and private funding. Officials said the cost of the museum will only be known in summer when the feasibility plan is completed.

Fluxus Art

The new museum will focus on exhibitions of new media art, store parts of the New York City anthology film archive, and have a permanent collection of Fluxus art. This art movement flourished in New York in the 1960s, and was led by Lithuanian-born artist George Maciunas.

The Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center in Vilnius is opening an exhibition of all three proposals for the museum. The collection of Fluxus art from the Jonas Mekas Center will form the basis of the new museum's permanent collection.

The Guggenheim operates museums in Berlin, and Bilbao, Spain, and is building a new museum in Abu Dhabi set to open by 2013.

The Guggenheim-Hermitage union was launched in 2000 as a way to pool the resources of the Hermitage's extensive collection of pre-1917 art with the Guggenheim's modern and contemporary art collection. Both museums regularly hold exhibitions at locations worldwide.

The Hermitage has nearly 3 million items, a third of which are coins and medals. The museum's greatest works are classical paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, Rubens, and the French impressionists, as well as ancient Greek and Scythian jewelry.

Among many other projects, Hadid is building the aquatic center for the 2012 London Olympic Games.

(John Varoli writes for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the reporter on this story: John Varoli in Moscow at jvaroli@gmail.com

Last Updated: April 9, 2008 13:34 EDT