Great Egyptian Museum

Cairo, Egypt

(Competition project, 2003)

The museum is sited on the edge of the Giza plateau. The permanent displays are contained within 5 elevated vessels aligned toward the pyramids and pinned together by a series of walkways from which visitors can gain complex and shifting views of the distant structures. These walkways form part of a series of ‘hypertext threads’ that allow visitors to construct alternative itineraries that cut across the standard curatorial divisions of the collection. Below the vessels a garden and external exhibition space shelters. This in turn sits on the upper surface of a new constructed topography that was generated through a process of mapping shadows upon the desert surface around the pyramids. The resultant ‘thick’ subterranean landscape is highly permeable from the exterior. It structures the entry sequence to the vessels, and contains restaurants and exhibition, archive and support spaces in a differential patchwork of environmentally conditioned zones.