Building Reputations

In 2002, the Egyptian Government announced an international architectural competition to design a new museum to house the treasures of ancient Egypt on a sloping site two kilometres north of the Giza pyramid complex. Over 1,500 entries were received from eighty-three different countries and in 2003 Dublin-based Heneghan Peng Architects were announced as the winners. This victory inaugurated a period of unprecedented international success by, and recognition of, Irish architects, typified but certainly not confined to O’Donnell and Tuomey winning the RIBA Gold Medal in 2015; McCullough Mulvin’s selection to modernise Thapar University campus in Patiala, India; Grafton Architects curating the 2018 Vencie Biennale, winning the 2020 RIBA Gold Medal, the 2020 Pritzker Prize, and the 2021 RIBA Stirling Prize; Heneghan Peng winning the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church competition in 2023; and Níall McLaughlin winning the RIBA Gold Medal in 2026.

Róisín Heneghan from Belmullet, Co. Mayo, and Shih-Fu Peng from New York met as postgraduate students in Harvard in the early 1990s. They established their practice in New York in 1999 before relocating to Dublin in 2001. Other projects by the practice include the Palestinian Museum at Bir Zeit in the West Bank, the Giant’s Causeway Visitor Centre, Co. Antrim, and the refurbishment of the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. Model-making is an important design tool within the practice, allowing ideas to be explored and tested in three dimensions. Several cardboard and paper study models for the Egyptian Museum show the evolution of key elements in the competition submission. This study model shows the great staircase, one of the features which convinced the jury of the merits of Heneghan Peng’s proposal. Ascending from an entrance court to provide access to the twelve main galleries, the staircase functions both as a key circulation route and an exhibition space in its own right. It culminates in a view of the pyramids.

Construction of the Grand Egyptian Museum began in 2005, but the project was beset by substantial delays caused by, amongst other issues, a global recession, the Arab Spring, and the Covid-19 Pandemic. Heneghan Peng’s direct involvement ended in 2009, but the essence of their competition-winning design remains intact. The museum finally opened to the public in November 2025.

Time/Travel

Emmett Scanlon

Models are not just expressive devices but tools for thinking. Moreover, making and thinking are not two autonomous operations. Instead, they happen simultaneously. Models in the studio play an active role for conducting experiments, measurements, and tests, generating new knowledge of the building-to-be.

Albena Yaneva, ‘Missed Magic: Models and the Contagious Togetherness of Making Architecture’, Eflux.com, September 2022

I have not been to Egypt, much less to the Grand Egyptian Museum by Dublin-based architects Heneghan Peng. The closest I have been to the latter is reading the drawings of the architects, looking at photographs of the building online, or hearing the stories of those who have visited and have returned to tell tales of ‘bins clad in marble’. As an architect, or a writer, or as anyone really, you no longer have to visit buildings to come to know them, or, for them to have some influence on how you consider architecture or the work of specific architects. Of course, buildings do not move, but architects do want, indeed they need them to travel. Architects need buildings to move through the various forms of online, print or other media upon which architecture cultural consumption has been (fig. 30.1), and continues to be, built (fig. 30.2). And they need this, so they and their buildings become known and their career advanced.

In 2002, the government of Egypt announced an international architectural competition to design a new museum to house the treasures of ancient Egypt. This was to be on a spectacular site, just two kilometres north of the Giza pyramid complex – the actual pyramids (fig. 30.3). Understandably, the competition was of global interest, with more than 1,500 entries from eighty-three different countries finally submitted.

Remarkably, fantastically, in 2003 Heneghan Peng Architects were announced as winners. Construction began in 2005 and was only completed, for various reasons of delay, in 2025, with the architects ceasing their involvement in the project in 2009.