More than $1 billion and two decades later, the Grand Egyptian Museum is — finally — ready to share its treasures

By Oscar Holland, CNN

(CNN) — When Róisín Heneghan received a phone call 22 years ago announcing that her four-person architecture firm had been chosen to design one of the world’s largest museums, she thought it was a prank. She called the official back to ensure it wasn’t some elaborate ruse.

“It was unreal,” she recalled in a video interview from Dublin, Ireland, where she runs Heneghan Peng Architects alongside husband Shih-Fu Peng. “We got the call, and I put down the phone — because in those days, it was all by phone or by letters and post — and I said, ‘I think we won.’”

Eighteen months earlier, in 2002, Egypt’s government had launched an international design competition for its Grand Egyptian Museum, a vast complex expected to house 100,000 ancient artifacts a stone’s throw from the Pyramids of Giza.

What was even more surprising than a little-known Irish firm’s proposal being chosen from 1,556 entries, is that it would take more than two decades — and a budget that ballooned to well in excess of $1 billion — for Heneghan and Peng’s vision to be realized.

On Saturday, Egypt’s showpiece museum officially opens its doors after innumerable interruptions, delays and setbacks. It is a project of such significance to the country’s tourism-centric economy that the government has declared a public holiday to mark its inauguration.

First announced in 1992, plans have endured Egypt’s Arab Spring-era revolution in 2011 and a military coup d’état two years later. In 2017, CNN optimistically included the museum in its list of the “world’s most anticipated buildings completing in 2018,” before the Covid-19 pandemic put paid to hopes of an imminent opening.

Described in the architects’ press release as “a testament to the longevity and scale of ancient Egyptian civilization,” the museum also reflects the patience of its designers. (By comparison, the Centre Pompidou in Paris opened just six years after the winner of its design competition was announced in 1971.)

Heneghan said she last visited the museum, which was then still being built, a “few years ago.” She will not be in attendance at Saturday’s inauguration and, having been given no supervisory role during construction, the firm sometimes relied on photographs and Google Earth to check on the building’s progress.

“In Egypt, and in many projects in that region, a lot of the time the supervision teams are completely different from the design team — and that was the process here,” she offered as explanation.

Heneghan also said there have been some changes to the original design, but that this “is to be expected” for a building of this scale. For the 62-year-old architect, who was in her late 30s when the competition was announced, seeing the project come to fruition has, nonetheless, been worth the wait.

“Big projects are complicated,” she said diplomatically, when asked about the successive delays. “This is a big museum, and they’re moving very, very sensitive pieces in. So, if it takes a little longer and do it properly, I think it’s worthwhile.”

Among these fragile artifacts are millennia-old papyrus scrolls, textiles, sarcophagi, pottery and mummified human remains. They are set across more than 258,000 square feet of permanent exhibition space, making it the world’s largest museum dedicated to a single civilization. Galleries are organized by historical period, from the predynastic period through to the Coptic era — or from about 3000 BC to the 7th century AD. A Tutankhamun gallery, meanwhile, displays 5,000 items found in the young king’s tomb.

“We wanted visitors to appreciate the scale of the collection,” Heneghan said of her original vision for the design.

Outside, manicured gardens and an open plaza (complete with an 87-ton obelisk) welcome visitors to the site. The museum experience begins, however, in a soaring atrium, where a 36-foot-tall statue of Ramesses II stands solemnly on guard. The angular, pyramidal motifs employed on the building’s facade — expressed in concrete, glass and locally sourced limestone — carry through to this grand internal courtyard.

Roof folds allow a generous amount of light into the space — it is a luxury afforded by the fact that stone artifacts are less vulnerable to sun exposure than organic ones like paintings, for instance. Breaking from museum orthodoxy, Heneghan felt that natural daylight would “create a better ambience, rather than always being in an artificially lit space.”

The functional centerpiece is a six-story staircase, which leads museumgoers past stone monuments and pharaonic statues arranged in reverse chronological order. At its summit lies the greatest artwork of them all: a direct and unobstructed view of the Giza pyramid complex, just over a mile away.

Designing a landmark beside one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World would have been a daunting task for any architect. Heneghan and Peng’s approach was one of visual deference.

This was partly a matter of geometry: The slope of the museum’s roof points directly at the tallest point of the Great Pyramid — but no higher, so that the building, despite its hulking size, does not encroach on or overshadow its neighbor’s profile. Viewed from above, the museum’s volumes fan out like a wide-lensed telescope, the lines of its walls mathematically aligned to the vista it serves. Elsewhere, storage and conservation facilities, including 17 laboratories, are hidden further back, connected to the museum via a tunnel.

“We spoke about it as creating a new ‘edge’ to the desert plateau,” Heneghan said, describing the challenge of respecting the surroundings while designing at scale. “It was always a balance. It’s a very large and very significant building.” The trick, she said, was giving the museum “the prominence it demands” but only in “the horizontal,” not the vertical — in other words, without impeding the skyline.

It was, perhaps, this lack of architectural ego that saw Heneghan and Peng’s scheme triumph over entries from more than 80 countries back in 2003. And although winning the commission, just four years after establishing their practice, supercharged the pair’s public profile (“for us, it opened up a whole world of possibilities,” Heneghan said, adding: “people knew who we were because of the museum”) they have remained committed to thoughtful and understated design.

But much else has changed for the pair in the decades since that fateful phone call. Their firm has opened an office in Berlin, and they now employ 20 people working across commercial, residential, educational and civic projects. They have produced other major works of cultural architecture, from West Bank’s Palestinian Museum to the Giant’s Causeway Visitors’ Centre in Northern Ireland.

Yet, Heneghan stands by the early-career design that she — and her firm — may always be best known for. If asked to design Egypt’s most prestigious museum from scratch, today, she wouldn’t do too much differently, she said.

“Our approach would still be very similar,” Heneghan added. “I think the underlying structure of the project is very strong, and I think it stands up over the years.”

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