Cataract vision: The ideas behind this museum, built to celebrate the civilizations inundated by the aswan high dam, are terribly compromised. But it is very popular - Nubian Museum at Aswan in Egypt - Brief Article

Architectural Review, The, Nov, 2001

The Nubian Museum at Aswan in Egypt was set up to salvage and display artefacts that would have been inundated when Lake Nasser filled the valley after construction of the notorious High Dam in the 1960s. It is in the hotel district, on a ridge to the south-west of the city, between Nile and airport road. In Pharaonic times, it was a granite quarry for statues and obelisks.

The museum has two parts, the building proper, and an outdoor exhibition with some transplanted old buildings and a canal, intended to be an abstraction of the Nile. The main exhibition area of the museum is in the basement, with entrance and lecture halls, temporary galleries and shops on the ground floor, and the cafeteria, library and administrative offices on the first floor.

The basic design, by Mahmoud El-Hakim, has been brutally compromised in many ways. He wanted to arrange access to the lower gallery floor down ramps, that would have gradually introduced visitors to underground mysteries, which were to be dominated by the statue of Rameses II lit from above by a skylight. But El-Hakim, who had been appointed in 1979, was dismissed in 1984 for not delivering the working drawings (though most had been submitted, and UNESCO seems to have almost wilfully misunderstood his intentions). In a ludicrous misinterpretation of the design, the engineering consultants, who he had brought onto the site, decided that the ramps were for disabled access, and replaced them with a couple of lifts. The whole building was air conditioned, and artificially lit; Pharaoh's statue lost its skylight. The level of artificial lighting is very low, and causes complaints from visitors. The landscaping was not completed as originally envisaged; it offers no shade, and needs artificial pumping to make the a bstracted Nile flow. There is no proper continuity between interior and exterior, and views of the Fatimid Cemetery, intended to be a key element in the promenade, and junction of inside and outside, have been lost.

The building has a concrete frame and is clad in hand textured local sandstone laid in alternating 300 and 600mm courses. Materials have weathered well in the ten years since the building was completed. The technical assessor, Hana Alamuddin, believes that the massing works well with the topography, and points out that the building is 'very successful' with local people and tourists. The museum is the first in Egypt to have an educational section, and its technical facilities are used by museologists throughout the region. Local people, says Alamuddin, 'are very proud of their museum. They bring their visitors to see it and feel it reflects their way of life ... [It] plays a very important role in informing the rest of Egypt about the rich Nubian culture, combating prejudice against what some consider to be a backward part of Egypt'.

None the less, it is difficult not to believe that the terribly compromised building won an award for reasons other than architectural excellence.