In the realm of museum architecture, the white cube exerts a profound influence on contemporary museum design. In 1976, artist Brian O’Doherty interrogated the abstract, sterile character of the 20th-century museum’s interior environment in his book “The White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space”. This antiseptic curatorial standard requires minimizing distractions as much as possible by painting walls white, obscuring material details, and eliminating windows and other contextual connections. When architects have defied white cube expectations—as Frank Lloyd Wright famously did in his design of the spiraling ramp in New York’s Guggenheim Museum—the news makes headlines. In his introduction to O’Doherty’s book, art critic Thomas McEvilley argues for the importance of contextual awareness in the museum experience, supporting the conscientious strategy to “investigate things in relation to their context, to come to see the context as formative on the thing, and, finally, to see the context as a thing itself.”
Context is crucial in the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) in Giza, the new flagship destination for Egyptian antiquities. GEM is the antithesis of the white cube—a building in constant, animated dialogue with the objects it contains and the landscape in which it is situated. Designed by Dublin-based Heneghan Peng Architects, which won the project commission in a 2003 design competition, the 1.8 million square foot (168,000 m²) building recently opened for limited tours after much anticipation. Defined as the “largest museum in the world dedicated to one civilization,” the $1 billion project comprises nearly half a million square feet of exhibition halls housing 100,000 objects. Planned as one of the world’s leading archeological destinations, the museum functions not as a blank canvas for its collections but as a visually engaging container in constant conversation with its contents and location.
The Grand Egyptian Museum occupies 120 acres of land west of the Nile, with a clear view of the Giza Necropolis 1.2 miles south. As the new home for many collections long held in the 1902 Egyptian Museum in central Cairo, the GEM effectively brings funerary artifacts back to the Land of the Dead, where they were initially located. The wedge-shaped building consists of a series of folded plates that occupy a swath of the first desert plateau that rises to the foot of the pyramids. “The museum exists between the level of the Nile Valley and the plateau, never extending above the plateau,” explains the architect. “The design of the museum utilizes the level difference to construct a new ‘edge’ to the plateau, a surface defined by a veil of translucent stone that transforms from day to night.”
For GEM visitors, the museum’s site exerts a palpable presence. Arrival involves passing through two checkpoints and traversing a vast plaza, which the architect describes as a “series of layers.” The checkpoints provide the security and ticket collection functions usually housed within a museum’s lobby. This functional offloading is sensible, given that the museum entrance has no doors. Instead, one gains access to the main building under a large, wedge-shaped protrusion lifted off the ground to provide a generous passageway. This entrance leads to a vast atrium open at both ends, functioning as an outdoor plaza sheltered by a perforated roof structure.
The experiential quality of this open-air configuration cannot be overstated: soft desert breezes continuously waft throughout the space while the roof provides welcome shade, moderating the ambient air temperature. In this way, museum-goers enjoy an interior environment that is comfortable without being hermetic. Today’s vast majority of museums perpetuate a climate-based white cube treatment in the form of sealed, air-conditioned interiors. In contrast, the GEM’s direct linkage of primary public spaces and galleries with the outdoors imparts a dynamism and freshness that elevate the overall visitor experience (The landscaping and masterplan were designed in collaboration with West 8).
These spaces are full of large artifacts originally located in outdoor settings (a series of climate-controlled galleries, yet to be opened to the public, will house more vulnerable works, such as the relocated Tutankhamun collection). Colossal monuments such as the statue of Ramses II are situated within the central atrium. At the same time, collections of stone sculptures and architectural megaliths are strategically located along monumental stairways that function as ascending galleries. These stepped exhibits, also accessible via ramp escalators, navigate the elevation change between the Nile Valley and the desert plateau. At the uppermost level, visitors are rewarded with framed views of the Great Pyramid of Giza and the Pyramid of Khafre to the southeast (in plan, the GEM’s shape and orientation represent a view cone focused on the Giza Necropolis).
Materially, the building’s features throughout this spatial sequence contribute varied and dynamic influences. Large, faceted expanses of locally sourced concrete, metal, and stone—including the facade’s translucent marble—animate the visual backdrop. Meanwhile, the entire space is infused with dappled light softly filtered via the massive roofscape. This constellation of light changes in intensity, location, and color temperature depending on the presence of clouds as well as diurnal and seasonal changes.
An architecture so closely connected with its site, and which exerts such a strong sensory presence as a contextual backdrop for artifacts, is a rare and welcome contribution to contemporary museum design. To be sure, the GEM’s site is one of the world’s most historically significant landscapes, its statuary collections are sufficiently robust for an exterior environment, and Egypt’s perpetually dry climate allows for such an open-air configuration. Nevertheless, these realities provided significant design opportunities that an architect could easily have missed, given the seemingly inescapable paradigm of the white cube. Fortunately, Heneghan Peng Architects took full advantage of this potential, with extraordinary results.
As visitors flock to what will most certainly become one of the world’s most desirable travel destinations, the perpetuation of the white cube model for galleries—and hermetic architecture in general—will be increasingly called into question.
The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine or of The American Institute of Architects.
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