Before the visitor reaches the building, there is a landscape — the entry plaza, the hanging obelisk of Ramesses II, the gardens, the approach, the night-lit façade. A landscape-architectural reading of the GEM site as a designed landscape.
Each reading takes one element of the GEM site's designed landscape — the plaza, the obelisk, the gardens, the approach, the night-lit façade, the relationship to the desert edge — and reads it as a piece of landscape architecture.
The entry plaza of the GEM is a single vast paved forecourt that extends from the road frontage to the building's entrance, almost three hundred metres deep. As a piece of public-realm design it is the largest civic plaza in Egypt and one of the largest in the Arab world.
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The Ramesses II obelisk at the GEM's entrance is the first obelisk in the world to be installed in the so-called 'hanging' configuration — suspended on a glazed base that allows the visitor to walk underneath and view the carved underside, which on every other obelisk in history has been hidden against the stone of its plinth.
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The gardens of the GEM site occupy approximately twenty hectares — a substantial planted landscape on the desert edge of the Giza plateau. The planting is heavily weighted toward drought-tolerant Egyptian native species (acacia, sycamore-fig, tamarisk) rather than the more conventional formal-garden planting of nineteenth-century Cairo institutions.
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The visitor arrives at the GEM by one of three routes — the new museum road from Cairo, the old Haram road from the south-east, or the desert highway from the north — and is funnelled, in every case, into a single landscape-architectural arrival sequence that is the work of the landscape design team rather than of the architects.
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The GEM is the most ambitiously night-lit institutional building in Egypt. The night-lighting scheme — by a Berlin lighting practice, in collaboration with the architects — washes the limestone wall, the alabaster screen, and the obelisk in graduated warm light that is visible from the desert road.
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Landscape architect in private practice in Cairo, with a long working interest in public-realm projects in Egypt. Master's in landscape architecture from Harvard GSD, 2008. The notebook is the project of a long winter of site visits. More on the project →