It was the largest architectural competition in history. The challenge? To design what would become the world’s biggest museum for a single civilisation.
Back in 2002, when the Egyptian government announced the call to create a home for its country’s archaeological treasures, more than 1,500 firms from 83 countries applied. Just over a year later, when the winner was announced, there was some astonishment that the Grand Egyptian Museum would be designed not by the likes of Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid but by a small Irish firm: Heneghan Peng. “When we heard we had won,” Róisín Heneghan says, “we couldn’t believe it. We called them back and asked: Are you sure?”
Now, more than 20 years later, at a cost of more than $1 billion, the Grand Egyptian Musuem is finally set to fully open. The site has been opening in phases; at last, after a series of setbacks and delays, the entire complex will be on view from November 4th.
As this includes the entire Tutankhamen collection, previously shown only in parts, in the smaller and increasingly inadequate Egyptian Museum Cairo, on Tahrir Square, it promises to be extraordinary. Another star attraction is the Khufu ship, an intact solar barque originally sealed into the Great Pyramid more than 4,000 years ago.
RM Block
So how did a Dublin architectural practice with a team of just 18 people triumph over some of the biggest and most famous architectural names? “The most important thing,” Shih-Fu Peng says, “is the site. There is the desert plateau. Egypt is defined by the Nile: it cuts through Egypt, and that’s where the civilisation was spawned. But the Nile would have no relevance without the desert plateau. The client had already chosen the site, so we could almost” – he pauses – “not screw it up.”
It is a reply typical of Peng, who combines intellectual heft with a strand of wry wit.
“Any practice that created an object,” he says, “irrespective of how you argued it – a [Frank] Gehry, a [Peter] Zumthor, a Herzog & de Meuron – it wouldn’t work. An object would not work.”
A shortlist of 20 was created, and Heneghan and Peng went to Egypt. “We walked the site,” Peng says. “We spent four or five hours sitting on the desert plateau, overlooking Cairo, until the sun set into the evening. We realised at that point that our roof was too high. And so we took it down.”
This is the essence of the genius of their winning design. Instead of creating a monument to rival the pyramids, they looked instead at the height difference between the fertile Nile Valley and the desert above and took that 60 metres to find the space for their museum. Instead of standing out, it extends the land to meet the pyramids across a valley and so allows the iconic, as Peng puts it, to be in what is already there.
Heneghan and Peng, who are married as well as being architectural collaborators, met at Harvard, where Heneghan had gone to study after completing her degree at University College Dublin. A tutor assigned the pair a paper together, and the rest is clearly history.
Peng, who was born in Queens in New York – Heneghan was born in Co Mayo – describes himself as a nomad, having lived in Japan, Taiwan and the United States before Ireland. The pair put in time at big New York practices, Peng at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and Heneghan at Michael Gray, before establishing together in 1999. They have also since opened a Berlin office.
These experiences have led them to realise that a successful practice can remain small, bringing in collaborators and partners as needed. With the Grand Egyptian museum, this came to encompass 300 people from 13 companies, across six countries, on areas including landscaping, engineering and exhibition design.
And what about those delays? The project had been dogged with holdups and problems, to the degree that numerous websites appeared, claiming to know the “true” story. One waggishly pointed out that it “only” took 30 years to build the pyramids themselves.
From design to completion, the museum has taken 22, and the realities have been more to do with the global financial crisis, followed by the upheavals and regime changes of the Arab Spring of the early 2010s, and then the construction slowdowns of the pandemic in 2020. At this stage, however, Heneghan Peng had moved on. Heneghan says this is fairly typical of a project of this type in this region. “We won the competition back in 2003, and then went on to do all the design drawings. We handed over a package to go to the contractors for tender in 2009, at which point a supervising team was appointed.”
In practice, this has meant that their involvement effectively ended before the delays began, a relief about which they are tactfully, and professionally, reticent. The design drawings themselves were astonishingly complete, however, as the pair demonstrate via a presentation that they have doubtless given many times before, yet still make seem fresh and fascinating.
Part of the reason for this is that their temperaments seem to balance together so well. Both are deep thinkers, yet each has an irreverence that seems to spring from understanding that things don’t have to be the way they seem.
The Grand Egyptian Museum has almost 25,000sq m of permanent exhibition space – that’s almost four football fields, they point out – plus a children’s museum, conference and education facilities, shops and cafes, a large conservation centre and gardens on its 50-hectare site. Organising all that, the team went for a relatively simple design. Following the line of the plateau, and the lines created by the pyramids, a series of six passages, for want of a better word, fan up, widening to reach the apex of the space, where wide windows reveal the drama of the pyramids.
Apart from the colossal statue of Ramesses II at the entrance, the visitor is taken on a journey back in time, following a great and extended staircase to reach the viewing point. Smaller galleries to the sides house more treasures, including those from Tutankhamen’s tomb.
In all there are more than 100,000 artefacts to accommodate. And that’s another issue with designing a museum: how do you create a space that will be equally rewarding to the casual tourist, the invested local and the academic expert?
“That was significant,” Heneghan says. “It is a design for four or five million people a year. And a significant number will be international tourists, who will spend maybe two hours. But others will want to be here for four hours and more, so you need to have a fast route, and you also need to allow the specialists to come, and they’re going to want to be more focused.”
She outlines the way their design accommodates a gentle cooling of the air as you come in from the desert heat, so that you are not immediately blasted with the chill of air conditioning. “We want you to decompress a little, to slow down.” In this way the progression to the views of the pyramids should help you come to a point where you are truly ready to appreciate what you are seeing. “Cairo,” she says, “has spread out and around the pyramids, so when you come up here you’re not seeing the traffic around them.”
Beyond the layout, Heneghan describes how the project led to questions about the value of a museum in today’s culture. “There had been a bad grain harvest in Ukraine” – this predated Russia’s invasion. “The price of wheat was very high, and there was pressure on the project.” “Do you buy bread and feed people, or do you build a monument?” Peng adds, picking up the essence of the question. In the presence of the pyramids themselves, it is clear that the polarity of these choices has faced humanity time and again.
The narratives that weave around Egypt are fascinating, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous, taking in tales from curses on tomb robbers – actually a fungus that had gathered on the winding cloths, and was then released into the air as sarcophagi were opened – to animated vengeful mummies; and from wholesale looting to cultural appropriation. Such was the scale of the looting of Egyptian burial sites that mummies were even ground into pigments: “mummy brown” was manufactured in the United Kingdom until the early 1960s.
Earlier this year the Irish artist Dorothy Cross published Kinship, a book about her project to return the body of an Egyptian mummy that had been stored for years at University College Cork. Through its pages she and contributors including Edmund de Waal and Max Porter explored ideas of loss, being uprooted from one’s home, and the consequences of colonialism on an ability to protect and conserve one’s own cultural heritage. The book was also a vital reminder that Egyptian mummies are the bodies of people and that the pyramids were their graves.
Despite all these ideas, some commentators argue that Egypt’s heritage has been safer in the hands of museums in Europe and the United States. It is true that international collections can open our eyes to far-flung wonders, and to new ways of understanding the world, but removing them wholesale from their places of origin also presents too great an opportunity for exoticisation and a rewriting of the history of others. And so, although it has been designed by an Irish practice, the Grand Egyptian Museum presents an essential platform for a people possessed of an incredibly complex and rich culture to tell their own story once more.
“We have been lucky,” Heneghan says, considering their recent projects. “Typically,” Peng says, “you don’t win the lottery twice. But I think we have: with Egypt and with the Kaiser Wilhelm church” in Berlin (see below). “It’s knowing what not to do,” Heneghan says. “It’s looking,” Peng concludes. “Looking before stepping. Most people are so confident they step before they look. We look before we step, let’s put it that way.”
The Grand Egyptian Museum, designed by Heneghan Peng Architects, is open daily from Tuesday, November 4th
Five other projects by Heneghan Peng
Áras Chill Dara Civic Offices, Naas, Co Kildare
Róisín Heneghan and Shih-Fu Peng returned from New York to set up their practice in Dublin after winning the competition to design a headquarters for Kildare County Council. Their design, in collaboration with Arthur Gibney and Partners, won RIAI and Riba awards in 2006.
Giant’s Causeway Visitor Centre, Co Antrim
Using insights that would later inform their entry to design the Grand Egyptian Museum, Heneghan Peng’s visitor centre opened at Giant’s Causeway in 2012. It folds the building into the land, using a natural difference in height levels to accommodate the space, while echoing the basalt columns that characterise the famous Northern Ireland World Heritage Site.
Palestinian Museum, Birzeit, West Bank, Palestine
A project of Taawon (Welfare Association), a humanitarian organisation that supports communities in the West Bank and Gaza, as well as in the refugee camps and gatherings of Lebanon, Heneghan Peng’s museum is again enfolded in gardens, while using the terraced site to define the contours of the building. Opened in 2017, it won the 2019 Aga Khan Award for Architecture.
Old Tower of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, Berlin
A Berlin landmark that was severely damaged by bombs in the second World War, the Kaiser Wilhelm church dates back to the 1890s. Heneghan Peng have worked with Ralph Appelbaum Associates and the artist Susan Philipsz to create a memorial site. The design includes exhibition space and a visitor centre that, Heneghan said in 2023, would allow people “to get close again to the ruin, so you could feel the history embedded in those walls”. Work is ongoing.
Tír na nÓg, Land of the Young, A National Children’s Museum, Waterford
Heneghan Peng have already shaped exhibition spaces in Ireland, including, in Dublin, the refurbishment of the National Gallery of Ireland’s historic wings, which fully reopened in 2017. The big red pavilion for the Book of Kells Experience at Trinity College is also theirs, a temporary measure, while the Old Library is being restored. Now they are working on a new museum for children, bringing back into use a historic town house in the Viking Triangle in Waterford city that is due to open in 2027.
