About the Grand Egyptian Museum

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.

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.