Last winter, an internet website announced an international competition titled the Grand Egyptian Museum design competition, near the historical site of the Pyramids of Giza, for which architects from all over the world were invited to participate. After a precise technical process, with proper publicity and precise scheduling, the competition was administered in various stages, and at the end of the submission deadline, it was announced that 1,550 designs from 85 countries, having met the required conditions, had advanced to the final stage of the competition and were put before the judges for five days of evaluation. The prerequisite for participation was the payment of 350 dollars as a registration fee and the submission of brief documents certifying the participant as an architect in their country of residence.
This competition was held in two stages. In the first stage, 20 designs in the form of initial concepts were selected from among 1,550 entries to advance to the second stage. From these 20, one winner would be chosen. Each of the 20 selected first-stage entries was given 10,000 dollars as a grant for the second stage, and at the conclusion of the second stage, the first through third place winners would receive 250, 150, and 100 thousand dollars respectively. In addition, a sum of 130 thousand dollars would also be paid to those whose designs merited "special commendation." The total registration fees collected from participants thus exceeded 850 thousand dollars, while the total awards to be paid would amount to approximately 800 thousand dollars.
Around the month of Aban this year, an exhibition was held in Tehran in which eight designs from eight Iranian consulting firms, each accompanied by a foreign partner, were presented under the title of the design competition for the central building of the oil industry — in the form of first-phase drawings and models. From among them, one of the Iranian consultants together with their Canadian partner won first place.
In this competition, each of the eight groups was paid approximately 1 billion rials as a design fee, the total amounting to over 1 million dollars for all groups, or 125 thousand dollars per participating group. These eight groups, as the selected representatives of Iran's architectural community, were chosen through a process, and their foreign partners were selected from among their own acquaintances.
The Grand Egyptian Museum design competition, perhaps due to the special conditions and location of the historic Giza Pyramids site and the organizers' insistence on a digital museum with complex and modern requirements, may be the most important architectural competition of the past half-century — stirring architects from 85 countries into action regardless of age, taste, work experience, and discriminatory ethnic and national constraints. The cultural and architectural consequences will become evident at the end of its second stage. In this competition, people who have never seen one another and may never meet have thought about the same issues and worked in the same field.
In the latest news on the Egyptian Museum competition website, the statements of Dr. Bassem Mansour, the competition organizer, are deeply moving: "We all worked and strove until everything was ready. We are confident that the architects' sole aim is... and we too had a greater goal: this event. This competition is indebted to the efforts of all those who joined us with their ideas... and we will put these ideas to work. Very good designs are among the 20 selected entries. But we are compelled, according to the rules of the competition, to select one winner... and the point is precisely this: that both winners and losers will share in this project, because they have enjoyed doing it."
The architectural community throughout the world is also awaiting the selected designs to examine and analyze them, just as many projects that did not win architectural competitions have nevertheless secured their place in the important developments of architecture — among them the projects of Jussieu by Koolhaas, Nara by Shirdel, and Yokohama by Greg Lynn and others.
The intelligence of the competition organizers in a third-world country like Egypt, which seemingly has no more facilities than Iran, succeeded in summoning 2,500 architects from all over the world and elevating this competition to nearly an international event. Perhaps the first-place winner will be young people like the 31-year-old Renzo Piano and 34-year-old Richard Rogers who designed the Centre Pompidou, or Farshid Moussavi at 31 who designed the Yokohama Port Terminal — young people who, despite very limited means, with fresh thinking and the energy of youth, created works that can stand alongside well-known names like Frank Gehry, whose Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao still causes tremors.
It is good to also think about this: in this competition, several thousand young architects and experienced architects gained the opportunity to work together and to learn from one another. They had ideas, exchanged them, thought, and experimented. Now let us consider that, according to unofficial statistics, Iran has 9,000 architecture graduates and 9,000 eager architecture students — about 18,000 people — and in a country where the thirst for professional experience is palpable, holding such a competition could have bestowed international prestige upon Iranian culture. Not only was this opportunity readily squandered, but it also left behind irrecoverable costs. The amounts paid to the consulting firms participating in this competition are 150 thousand dollars more than the Egyptian competition's revenue from entry fees alone — setting aside the costs of the organizing consultant and the expenses of holding the competition, which were undoubtedly borne by the state client.
Hence, this question arises: given the organizers' desire to draw on international experience, why was the competition not held internationally, and why was no effort made to cover a major portion of the competition costs through registration fees? After all, were the costs covered by surplus oil revenues, or did charitable organizations fund them?