Wonders will never cease

A team of young Dublin architects has pulled off a coup, writes Frank McDonald

Róisín Heneghan and her partner, Shih-Fu Peng, are recovering from the shock of winning one of the most prestige-laden architectural commissions ever: the chance to build a great museum within close sight of the pyramids of Giza. Heneghan.peng.architects, their Dublin-based company, beat more than 1,500 practices from 83 countries in an international competition to design the €300 million Grand Egyptian Museum.

"We were stunned. We just couldn't believe it," says Heneghan. "It was such a big competition, most likely the largest in history, that we called back three times to check that we hadn't got the message incorrectly. It's starting to sink in now."

The museum, which will be built at the first desert plateau outside Cairo, north of the great pyramids, will be the world's largest museum of Egyptian artefacts. It will also house a conference centre, library and multimedia facilities, "virtually hosting" important items of Egyptology from collections all over the world, making it the first global virtual museum: both a repository and an interactive cultural resource. The Egyptian government, which wants work to start as soon as possible, is already looking for a project manager. As it can hardly be expected to foot the bill, it will be funded in part by the World Bank and by other countries, including Japan.

The design takes advantage of a 35- to 40-metre height difference on the lower plateau at Giza, between the southern suburbs of Cairo and the pyramids, to remake the face of the plateau.

The museum's galleries are on the top floor, with views of the pyramids. Its surface, a thin veil of translucent stone structured by fractal geometry, is also intended to trace a new visual trajectory towards the pyramids on the higher plateau. The real challenge was to design a vast new facility that would not detract from these wonders of the world. And in the competition, which was judged anonymously, heneghan.peng.architects triumphed because its solution was seen as the best.

John Graby, director of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland, hailed the result. "It's more permanent and significant than an Oscar, because this is something that's going to be there in the shadow of the pyramids for generations to come." Apart from being an "extraordinary testament" to the ability of the winning architects, it underlines the importance of open architectural competitions in developing talent. Without them, heneghan.peng.architects might never have emerged. For it was on the strength of winning a competition for the design of civic offices for Kildare County Council and Naas Urban District Council in 2000 that Heneghan and Peng set up their practice in New York and, later, moved to Dublin.

Coincidentally, the foundation stone for the Naas project, which is a collaboration with Arthur Gibney & Partners, was laid last Monday. But neither Heneghan nor American-born Peng, who are both under 40, could be there, as they had to go to Cairo.

Heneghan, who graduated from University College Dublin's school of architecture in 1987, now teaches there as a final-year studio tutor, as does her partner, who is a graduate of Cornell University, in New York state.

They worked on their entry for the Cairo competition with Edel Tobin and Alicia Gomis-Perez, as well as structural engineers Ove Arup and Cecil Balmond, building services engineers Buro Happold, lighting designers Bartenbach LichtLabor and Kandor Modelmakers. Winning it was a coup for all of them.