The Grand Egyptian Museum took twenty-three years to build, from the site selection of 2002 to the opening night of November 2025. A construction-history journal, written from the public record, the trade press, and the archival photographs of the works.
Each chapter is a phase of the works — site selection, competition, first phase, main contractor, the COVID interruption, the opening — written from the trade press, the official communiqués, and conversations on the site itself.
The site selection of January 2002, on a fifty-hectare parcel two kilometres from the Khufu pyramid, was the first public act of the project. The choice of site — outside the existing archaeological zone, but within sight of the pyramids — established the building's argument before a single drawing was made.
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The competition opened in January 2002 and closed in June 2003 with 1,557 entries from eighty-three countries. The winner — Heneghan Peng, a five-person practice in Dublin — was announced in a press conference at the Manial Palace in late June, in the Egyptian summer heat.
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The first phase of construction — site preparation, foundations, the conservation centre — ran from 2010 to 2014 under a Belgian-Egyptian joint venture. The conservation centre opened first, in 2010, three years before any work began on the main museum building itself.
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The main building contract was awarded in 2014 to a Belgian-Egyptian joint venture working from a site office at the south of the parcel. The long middle of the project — six years of cladding, structure, services, internal fit-out — is the least photographed and the least written about phase of the works.
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In March 2020 the works paused. The site went quiet for the better part of a year, with a skeleton crew on the conservation centre and the main building dark behind its scaffolding. The restart, in late 2021, was slow and was complicated by the global supply problems of the period.
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Trade reporter for the Egyptian construction press, twenty-six years on the beat. Lives a kilometre from the GEM site and watched the cladding go on, course by course, from his balcony. More on the project →