When Róisín Heneghan received a phone call 22 years ago announcing that her four-person architecture firm had been chosen to design one of the world’s largest museums, she thought it was a prank. She called the official back to ensure it wasn’t some elaborate ruse.
“It was unreal,” she recalled in a video interview from Dublin, Ireland, where she runs Heneghan Peng Architects alongside husband Shih-Fu Peng. “We got the call, and I put down the phone — because in those days, it was all by phone or by letters and post — and I said, ‘I think we won.’”
Eighteen months earlier, in 2002, Egypt’s government had launched an international design competition for its Grand Egyptian Museum, a vast complex expected to house 100,000 ancient artifacts a stone’s throw from the Pyramids of Giza.
What was even more surprising than a little-known Irish firm’s proposal being chosen from 1,556 entries, is that it would take more than two decades — and a budget that ballooned to well in excess of $1 billion — for Heneghan and Peng’s vision to be realized.
On Saturday, Egypt’s showpiece museum officially opens its doors after innumerable interr
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