The New Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) at Giza

The Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza

The Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) will be built on a 50 hectares of land in Giza and is part of a new master plan for the plateau. On January 5, 2002 Egyptian President Mubarak laid the foundation stone for the Grand Egyptian Museum. The museum site is about three kilometers from the Giza pyramids.

The general properties of the site for the new museum.

An international competition was held to choose the building design. The winning building design was by Heneghan Peng Architects of Ireland.

Ahram Weekly quoted the architect Peng:

"The museum," says Peng," will link modern Cairo to the ancient Pyramids, and will be partly ringed by a desert wall containing half a million semi-precious stones."

The center of the museum complex will be the Dunal Eye, the area containing the main exhibition spaces. Around the Dunal Eye will spread a network of streets, piazzas and bridges, to link he museum's sections.

The GEM's façade will be constructed of translucent alabaster, allowing the light to penetrate inside the museum's halls.

The museum's grand staircase will climb up through time with the collections in chronological order. On the uppermost floor, a viewing platform will look across the plateau to the Pyramids of Giza.

The collections will be organised in themes:

• the physical environment of the Nile valley and the surrounding desert and oases

• kingship and the state,

• religious practices during the Amarna period

• daily lives of the ancient Egyptians, their sports, games, music, arts and crafts as well as their cultural and social practices.

A separate building will house the conservatory, library, media center and other resources. A large piazza will separate the Eye from a series of flexible conference and exhibition spaces.

Spiral patterned gardens will be planted along the topographical planes around the Dunal Eye.

On August 25, 2006 the Statue of Ramesses II was moved from Ramses Square in Cairo to the Giza Plateau, in anticipation of construction of the GEM. The Statue of Ramesses II, estimated to be approximately 3,200 years old, will be cleaned and touched up, and will be situated at the entrance of the GEM by 2010.

While the GEM will not replace the Egyptian Museum, It will allow all of the stored artifacts to be redistributed between the two museums. It is said that the Tutankhamun exhibit will be moved to the Giza Museum.

The Second place design by Coop Himmelb(l)au, Austria, showing clearly the relationship of a building set into the proposed site to the Pyramids of Giza: