Situated on a plateau between the modern city of Cairo and the ancient pyramids of Giza, the Grand Museum of Egypt will be home to over 150,000 artefacts. Amongst these are the treasures of King Tutankhamun, many of which will be on public display for the first time having spent years preserved in storage since their discovery by Howard Carter in 1922.
The 90,000m2 museum, which occupies a 50 hectare site, aims to establish a state-of-the-art complex of facilities providing visitors with access to a broad range of information.
It will incorporate the latest multimedia technologies and is intended to be the first global virtual museum, displaying artefacts physically in the museum and also virtually, hosting items from European collections. A specialist Buro Happold team has designed the Museum's IT strategy to meet both the communications goals set by the brief and the architect's desire for the IT infrastructure to be invisible.
A key challenge in developing a strategy for the internal environment is to ensure that the temperature and atmosphere are appropriate for housing and protecting ancient, often fragile artefacts that can be highly susceptible to climate change.
Architecturally, the design features an external translucent stone wall, with a “fractured” facade and folded plane roof, which makes a new edge to the face of this desert plateau. Its facilities will be arranged over four primary levels.
Date: 2003 - 2010
