Grand Egyptian Museum officially opens
ATELIER BRÜCKNER designed the heart of the museum
The Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) in Giza will officially open on 3 July 2025. At the centre of the event is the spectacular Tutankhamun Gallery – a once-in-a-century project designed by ATELIER BRÜCKNER. For the first time, the complete burial treasure of the legendary boy king Tutankhamun will be presented to the public – over 100 years after its discovery in the Valley of the Kings.
"Designing the Tutankhamun Gallery was a unique opportunity – in terms of content and design. We tell the story of the king as a spatial narrative, from life to death and into the afterlife. Being allowed to stage this burial treasure in its entirety for the first time is both an emotional and professional milestone," says Shirin Frangoul-Brückner, Managing Director of ATELIER BRÜCKNER. "With the opening on 3 July, this landmark project finally becomes accessible to all."
Spanning 7,500 square metres on the second floor of the new museum building, the Tutankhamun Gallery is located just a few hundred metres from the Pyramids of Giza. It was conceived by ATELIER BRÜCKNER in 2017 and designed as an immersive, narrative experience. The building itself was designed by the renowned architecture firm heneghan peng architects. With over 90,000 square metres, the GEM is the world’s largest museum of Egyptian culture and is expected to welcome more than 15,000 visitors daily.
ATELIER BRÜCKNER met this challenge by creating an intelligent visitor guidance system that structures the monumental spaces and gives even small objects a strong presence. In two parallel wings – each 180 metres long and up to 16 metres high – all about 5,600 artefacts from the pharaoh’s tomb are displayed, including around 3,000 objects that have never been shown publicly. The undisputed highlight: the world-famous golden mask of Tutankhamun. The tour through the gallery is a spatial-dramatic journey through the life, coronation, death, and afterlife of the god-king. It concludes with an abstracted full-scale tomb model, staged through media. Architecture, scenography, lighting, materials, graphics, and interactive media interlock to create an emotional, holistic experience.
But it’s not just the Tutankhamun Gallery that bears the signature of ATELIER BRÜCKNER: key areas such as the atrium with the over eleven-metre-tall statue of Ramses II, the striking Grand Staircase, and the Piazza were also designed by the German studio. The Children’s Museum, with 3,465 square metres of exhibition space, was also part of their commission.
