Grand Egyptian Museum
Complementing the Great Pyramids
Hovering over the moment where the Nile Valley gives way to the desert, the museum caps a line of monuments dispersed along the Giza plateau. Both its location and the immensity of the program (slated to be the world's largest museum) require a building of great symbolic value. Visible from the city as a horizontal monolith, the rigid box-truss complements the power of the adjacent Great Pyramids.
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Client: The Egyptian Government
Location: Giza, Egypt
Year: 2002
Status: Unbuilt
Arrival Experience & Plans
Arrival to the museum occurs along roads flanked by a lush garden to one side and a high desert wall on the other. Upon approaching a large civic plaza replete with parking and drop-off facilities, visitors are drawn in by a large desert canopy shading multiple entrances to the complex, as well as the massive box seeming to float above the plateau.
Interior Organization
Visitors then filter through the museum village, along passages that are alternately punctuated by cavernous darkness and intense light, eventually arriving at the Great Hall. Here, they are lifted on immense moving platforms to the galleries above. The exhibit halls are organized around courtyards, each with its own character defined by the location of large "windows" revealing views of the pyramids, the sky, and the desert floor below.