More than 4,500 years after the Ancient Egyptians built the marvels at Giza, a new museum is taking shape that when finished will be bigger than the Louvre in France. Andrew Humphreys goes on site
As building sites go, it is unmatched. What could present more of a challenge than to design a major new structure to sit beside the world’s most iconic buildings, the Pyramids of Giza?
That new structure is the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), which, when complete, will be the biggest museum of Egyptology in the world, and (it’s claimed) the largest archaeo-logical museum of any sort.
It is long overdue. Egypt already has the world-famous Egyptian Museum on Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo. When completed in 1902 by French architect Marcel Dourgnon it was meant to exhibit 10,000 antiquities, but today there are more than 120,000 pieces on display with tens of thousands more in storage. Few of these warehoused items have been seen since being deposited on their cobwebby basement shelves. The museum’s galleries have also changed little over the past century: they are dingy and severely lacking not just in information about the exhibits, but also in such rudiments as adequate toilet facilities and, in a city where summer temperatures can reach 40˚C, air conditioning.
Providing a spacious new home for Egypt’s unparalleled collection of antiquities is one thing, but what sets the GEM project apart from all other recent high-profile museums is the proximity of its ancient neighbours.
Contrary to the standard postcard views – all shot from carefully selected angles – the Pyramids no longer loom majestically above the desert. Cairo’s rising tide has all but engulfed them in shanty villages while braiding the Giza Plateau, the rocky outcrop on which the ancient monuments sit, with traffic-choked ring roads. The new museum, which will join the Pyramids up on the plateau, will transform the visitor experience, replacing the shabby gauntlet of postcard sellers and insistent touts offering camel rides (US$5 to get up on the beast, a further $10 to be let off) with spacious esplanade approaches and carefully framed views. The success of this dialogue between the ancient and new was a vital factor when it came to selecting the museum’s architects.
In 2002 a competition was announced via international trade journals and personal letters to some 400 architectural practices to design a museum beside the Pyramids. By 7 April that year, 2,227 offices from 103 countries had paid the US$350 registration fee. By the time the deadline for entries expired four months later 1,557 designs had been received.
A first selection whittled the schemes down to a preliminary 265; a more rigorous sifting narrowed the field to 20. Under the terms of the competition all entries were anonymous and would remain so until the winning scheme was selected. It was later discovered that at least one big name architect, Zaha Hadid, made the first cut but not the second, a shortlist that, unknown to the judges at the time, included award-winning Austrian cooperative Coop Himmelb(l)au, but also a young student from Egypt who had yet to have anything built. In a ceremony held in June 2003 the winner was announced as the Dublin-based firm Heneghan-Peng.
Professor of architecture at Ain Shams University in Cairo and practising architect Dr Yasser Mansour was in charge of the selection process. In his sparsely furnished offices on the edge of the Giza Plateau, he explains what impressed the judges about the Heneghan-Peng design. “Many of the schemes buried the museum under the desert as if it were a tomb, so you don’t have the flair of having a new museum. Some of them built it on top of the plateau, which competes with the Pyramids. Shih-Fu [Peng] did neither.”
The site, Dr Mansour explains, is on the edge of the desert, where the land climbs dramatically. In Ancient Egypt the low land of the Nile flood plain was agricultural, where people lived and farmed, and the high land of the surrounding desert was where they buried tombs and treasures. Peng’s scheme, he says, bridges the two. “The highest point of the museum, the top of the façade, is the lowest point of the Pyramids, which are built on the plateau. This way you don’t compare the museum with the greatness of the Pyramids.”
The key to this transition in heights is illustrated on a series of large drawings fixed to the wall behind Dr Mansour’s desk. They show an enormous 50 metre-high wall – “a cliff face” according to Róisín Heneghan, Peng’s partner – running the length of the site and formed of a precise geometric pattern created of triangular segments. The wall will be clad in onyx, a stone chosen for its translucent qualities, allowing daylight to penetrate inside and the building to glow at night (see pages 64-5).
Once inside the museum, visitors will encounter a vast lobby from where a similarly immense staircase, 600 metres long, climbs through the museum giving access to the various galleries. Exhibits will be grouped chronologically but there’ll also be the option of navigating by themes such as “Kingship and State”, or “Farming and Agriculture”. “These allow visitors to trace the history of ideas,” says Dr Man-sour, “not just look at things and say, ‘Wow. Very nice’.” There will be a museum within a museum dedicated to Tutankhamun that will for first time bring together in one place all the boy-king’s treasures, including the stunning death mask, as well as many items as yet unseen by the public. The museum will also be linked through digital technology to other major Egyptological collections around the world such as the Louvre, the British Museum and New York’s Metropolitan. At the top of the grand staircase, visitors are greeted with a panoramic view of the Pyramids – “As if the Pyramids were in the galleries,” says Dr Mansour.
The GEM is scheduled to be ready by 2011. Except driving to meet Dr Mansour on the Cairo-Alexandria Desert Road, which passes by the museum’s grand façade, there is no sign whatsoever of any building. “Actually, we are pouring lots of concrete,” says Dr Mansour. “But you need to go around the back of the plateau to see it.”
The rear of the site is given over to a vast 32,000 square metre service zone, housing an energy plant, fire station, and a state-ofthe-art conservation and storage centre. The conservation centre is a vast, reinforced concrete bunker sunk into the plateau with a series of enormous hanger -like storage areas and spacious laboratories, which, when we visited, were in the process of being fitted out. The centre allows for artefacts to be brought to the site – from the basement of Downtown Cairo’s venerable Egyptian Museum, as well as from many other sites around the country – where they can be inspected, documented and held while the main museum building is being prepared. The transfer of the first batch of priceless treasures is due to start this summer and it’s estimated that the whole process will take three years.
The Tahrir Square museum will have a new life after the GEM opens, as a new Museum of Pharaonic Arts, housing “masterpieces” of Egyptology. It will act as a teaser for the main attraction out by the Pyramids. It will also receive a new air-conditioning system.
In the car park next to Dr Mansour’s Giza office, wrapped in scaffolding and corrugated iron, stands an 83-ton colossus of Rameses II. Recovered from a temple at Memphis, the original capital of Ancient Egypt, the 3,200-year-old statue stood in a square in front of Cairo’s railway station from 1955 until 2006. It was brought here, at a cost of US$1 million, to save it from the exhaust fumes that were causing the stone to deteriorate. The piece now awaits its final move, in 2011, when it will become the towering centrepiece of the GEM’s grand lobby. The first of a daunting 50,000 artefacts to arrive on site – and just three years to make ready their future home. But when it comes to inspiration, the contractors have only cast their gaze across the plateau to see what incredible building feats others have achieved in Egypt.
HENEGHAN -PENG
Heneghan-Peng is a Dublin-based practice founded in 1999 by Róisín Heneghan and Shi-fu Peng. Although a young firm, it has landed some significant commissions, most recently new footbridges at the London Olympic Park. The firm won the Grand Egyptian Museum design competition despite having only five staff members at the time. When the judges called to deliver the news, Heneghan thought it was a prank; she phoned back minutes later to ask “Is this really Cairo on the line? Have we really won?”
The office now has up to 40 architects working on GEM drawings. www.hparc.com
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