Grand Egyptian Museum
Competition to define the digital mediation devices for the Grand Egyptian Museum’s permanent exhibition
The Grand Egyptian Museum is currently under construction near the Giza pyramids in Egypt. The museum’s design and construction were awarded to architecture firm Heneghan Peng in June 2003. It will ultimately assemble the egyptological collections from various museums, particularly Tutankhamun’s treasure from the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir square. Scenography for the exhibition spaces was awarded to multiple architecture firms and museology experts. It is scheduled to open in 2020.
In 2012, Isozaki & Associates contacted Reciproque to provide a joint response to the Egyptian government’s consultation regarding scenography for the permanent exhibition space spanning 20,000 square meters and displaying nearly 130,000 archeological pieces. The design competition included both a critique on the existing program, an overhaul of the tour space, and the modernization of the mediation offerings.
Reciproque proposed several original solutions taking into account the widely varying scale of the pieces on display in the behemoth Heneghan Peng building and the sheer number of potential visitors. Immersive caves, outfitting of video walls, interactive wall maps, dynamic chronological timelines... our contribution to the project consisted of finding family-friendly ways to expand knowledge sharing collectively. After the application was submitted and presented to the Ministry of Egyptian Antiquities, the competition was suspended due to the 2011 revolution and was never continued.
