News Editor John O’Connor interviews architect Róisín Heneghan, winner of the world’s largest architectural competition. Heneghan discusses how her idea went from a sketch on the page to the new 8th Wonder of the World.
The last bricks were placed atop the Pyramids of Giza over 4,500 years ago and they were laid to endure an eternity. They have done just that and now across the Giza Plateau, its new sister stares back; the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM).
More than twenty years ago a small architectural firm based in Dublin, Heneghan Peng Architects, received a call to say their design for the GEM had won the world’s largest ever architectural competition for a completed building. ‘When we got the call, it was kind of amazing. I ended up calling back because we weren't quite sure if we heard the message right.’ Róisín Heneghan, co-partner of Heneghan Peng, told the University Observer.
Over two decades later, on 1 November 2025, now declared a national holiday in Egypt in recognition of its cultural significance, the Grand Egyptian Museum opened its doors to the public. Concluding a decades-long journey that created the largest museum in the world dedicated exclusively to a single ancient civilisation. ‘The GEM is more than a museum. It is a global cultural landmark that tells the full story of one of humanity’s greatest civilizations.’ said Dr. Ahmed Issa, Egypt’s Minister of Tourism and Antiquities, during the opening.
When we got the call, it was kind of amazing. I ended up calling back because we weren't quite sure if we heard the message right.
This gem of the desert will now face the pyramids for as long as each of these structures stay standing, locked into a perpetual conversation between their individual histories. ‘I have been living with [this design] for such a long time. I don't think we ever thought about [the GEM being there forever]. I hope the museum will be around that long,’ Ms. Heneghan said, ‘one of the things that stunned me when I started was just the duration - over 4,000 years since the pyramids have been completed. When you think about it, that's twice the length of Christianity.’
Separate from the country’s longevity, Egypt, its desert, its history, its people, can be defined by one thing; the Nile. This is what Ms. Heneghan described as a spring of inspiration for the structure, saying; ‘For Egyptians, Egypt is all about the Nile, not the desert. One of the things for us that was really important was that there's literally this physical condition where the Nile Valley has been cutting through the desert and there's usually quite a significant difference in level and that condition went right through our site.’
The topography of the land caused by the Nile’s path provided Ms. Heneghan a unique opportunity as, ‘there was a 50 metre or so difference in level across the site. So we decided that the building shouldn't go above the desert level, so it always stays below the desert to take in that view of the pyramids [...] One of the things we wanted, because of the site being so close to the pyramids itself, was to be able to see the pyramids from within the Permanent Exhibition galleries.’ The pyramid then becoming the final and most prized relic in the museum’s collection.
For those who were laid to rest in the pyramids on the outskirts of modern Cairo, death was only the beginning - and rising from the Great Hall to the upper galleries, the Grand Staircase shows their journey to eternity. Progressively lined with large-scale royal figures from the Predynastic Period, through to the Old, Middle, and New Kingdom, and finally to the Late Greco-Roman Period, you ascend amongst the kings and queens of Egypt along their journey, transforming what would have been a simple staircase transcending over topographical struggles into a powerful sculptural procession of Egyptian belief.
While designing the Grand Staircase Ms. Heneghan asked herself ‘is this a museum where everything is just laid out and it's up to each individual to decide what they want to take from it, or is it a museum [that] is laid out so it tells a story? It's a lot more didactic than that. This museum had to be able to allow those different narratives to be told whilst still not tying it down.’ Even while Ms Heneghan was deciding how best to tell this story, modern Egypt was rapidly turning the pages of its own history. As she told the University Observer, ‘a lot happened during [those 20 years of construction and planning] - the Arab Spring and a change of government.’ History simultaneously unfolding around them while attempting to physically personify it.
Far from the Giza Plateau however is Ms. Heneghan’s architectural firm, Heneghan Peng Architects, which she co-founded with her husband Shih-Fu Peng, in the heart of Dublin city. Despite Ireland’s and Ms. Heneghan’s geographical separation from ancient civilization, Heneghan Peng has continued to design physical embodiments and cultural nucleuses of these civilizations, such as the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit, West Bank.
While designing the Grand Staircase Ms. Heneghan asked herself ‘is this a museum where everything is just laid out and it's up to each individual to decide what they want to take from it, or is it a museum [that] is laid out so it tells a story?
Ms. Heneghan told the University Observer that this separation can be used ‘to an advantage. In that you have a certain distance, so sometimes you have the clarity that you're not completely caught up in it. I think we've always done better when we worked with somebody from that place as well. So, you both have the detachment of an outsider, but when you're working with somebody, you also get more of a sense of that culture that you're working in,’ for example ‘in Palestine we did a lot of work with the client team there and also we had a Romola based architect […] So, you know, it's kind of trying to, if you like, take all of those different strands and trying to make something of them.’
In Egypt, Ms. Heneghan has carefully interwoven these dynamic strands of eternity, royalty, and the divine together into an architectural marvel and a cultural tapestry for generations to come so that they may slow down for a moment and awe at what has come before them.
A second Wonder of the World has risen from the banks of the Nile.