Both of these, and most of the best shops, are located in the city’s Old Town. A couple blocks away is the Contemporary Art Center, the home of the Baltic Triennial of International Art as well as the world’s largest collection of Fluxus works by the movement’s most famous artists, including George Maciunas and Yoko Ono. It’s a feast for the eyes indoor and out, with a sculpture garden connected to a rooftop terrace as well as a bookstore and cafe. The brand new MO Modern Art Museum is a must-visit. “I always avoided it because they always look the same,” he says of the architectural element, “but this is geometric and angular-it was an epiphany.” It is also the first time Libeskind has incorporated a spiral staircase into a design. This is a first for the country, as it is not a state-owned museum. It was amassed in a relatively short period of time by financier and philanthropist Viktoras Butkus and his wife, Danguole Butkiene, who saw an “urgent need” to create this collection and make it available to the public. The museum is situated at the border of the Old Town, which is a UNESCO World Heritage site, and the new, gleaming white “articulated box” contains over 4,000 works of art by 226 Lithuanian artists, dating from the 1960s to the present day. “This is a classic European town which hasn’t been marred by Soviet intervention, so it retains a quality unlike many other cities that the Soviet Union destroyed,” observes the much-lauded architect, who originally hails from Poland. Lithuania’s capital city has remained fairly under the radar as a design destination, but this will undoubtedly change with the debut this week of the MO Modern Art Museum, the first privately funded modern and contemporary art museum in the country, designed by architect Daniel Libeskind.
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