who has lived in Prague for almost 30 years, worked on the design for the building with the well-known American architect Frank Gehry.

In a recent interview with RFE/RL's South Slavic Service, Milunic said the starting point was a sketch he had made in 1990.

"My idea was to combine into one building two parts that would be in mutual contradiction, in dialogue, like plus and minus, husband and wife, yin and yang." From this idea, the two architects developed a design consisting of two towers: "one static and the other dynamic, like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers," Milunic explains.

The tower depicting Fred is an upright concrete construction sporting a "top hat," while the "Ginger" tower is made of steel and glass and has swirling contours that suggest the dancer'sbillowing dress. Built on a site where an American bomber pilot mistakenly dropped his cargo of explosives in February 1945, the "Fred and Ginger" building stands next door to a Jugendstil apartment house where both Milunic and Czech President Vaclav Havel lived before the 1989 Velvet Revolution.

"Everything began when I was living in Havel's house," Milunic recalls. "In 1986, when Havel was still in and out of prison, he asked me to divide his apartment into two halves, one for his brother Ivan and the other for himself. And in 1986, we talked about the possibility of building a house on the corner, which had been empty since the end of the war.... When Havel became president, he commissioned me to make a preliminary study for the house,