The Grand Egyptian Museum: A Quarter Century in the Making | Architectural Record

With the completion of the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), there would conventionally be a storm of celebration, paired with substantial coverage in the media for what is ostensibly one of the most significant projects of its time. Adopting over 100,000 archeological artifacts from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo (designed by French architect Marcel Dourgnon in 1897), the proposed Grand Egyptian Museum was to offer a dignified home for these historical treasures, replete with the kind of environmental and museological protection they lacked in their 19th-century predecessor. Moreover, with a site located adjacent to the Giza complex, the new project would serve to mediate between the colossal monumentality of the pyramids and the conventional sprawl of contemporary Cairo, in effect a threshold between composed antiquities and unconstrained modernity.

Source: The Grand Egyptian Museum: A Quarter Century in the Making | Architectural Record