The competition for the design of Egypt's Grand Museum, on the historic site of the Giza Pyramids over an area of 80 000 square metres, was launched, and many architects from at least 108 countries took part; about 2 500 designs registered before the deadline. The technical organising committee, with careful announcements and timing, ran the competition through several stages, and at the close of submissions it was announced that 1 550 designs from 85 countries had qualified for the final round and were placed before a 5-day jury. The condition for entry was the payment of a US$250 registration fee and the production of a document confirming that the entrant is recognised as an architect at his place of residence. The competition was held in two stages. In the first, 20 designs were chosen from 1 550 in an initial contest to advance to the second stage. From these 20, one design will win. Each of the 20 selected in the first stage was given US$10 000 as an aid towards the second stage; at the end of the second stage, the first, second and third places will receive US$250 000, US$150 000 and US$100 000 respectively. A total of US$200 000 will also be paid to those whose designs deserve a 'special distinction'. Thus the total registration fees collected from the participants of the competition exceeded US$850 000, while the total prize money will reach US$800 000 — a sum less than 6.5 billion rials.
In early Aban (late October) of this year, an exhibition was held in Tehran in which the architectural designs of 8 Iranian consultants, together with their foreign partners, under the title of 'The Competition for the Design of the Headquarters Building of the Oil Industry', were displayed. The competition was held in a single stage, in the form of phase-one drawings and a model; from among them, one Iranian consultant, with his Canadian partner, took the first place.
In this competition each participant was paid 1 billion rials as an aid, and a total of 8 billion rials to the 8 groups — that is, about US$1 million in total and US$125 000 to each participating group. It has been announced that these Iranian groups had been selected as the qualified members of the Iranian architectural community to participate in the competition, and the 8 foreign partners had been chosen from among 30 ranked consultancies.
The architectural competition for the design of Egypt's Grand Museum may, in light of its special conditions and its placement on the ancient Giza-pyramids site, and the organisers' insistence on a digital museum with complex contemporary relations, be the most important architectural competition of the past half-century — one that drew architects into motion, the cultural and architectural consequences of which will become evident at the end of the second stage. In this competition, at one and the same time, people who have never seen one another — and may never see one another — have thought about the same matters and worked in the same field.
The latest statement on the website of the Egyptian Museum competition gave the words of Dr Yasser Mansour, the director of the competition, in a way that touches the heart: 'We all worked night and day, and tried to get everything ready. We are sure that the architects' aim was not only to win; for all of us a greater purpose is hidden in this event. This competition is indebted to the labours of all those who accompanied us with their ideas. We will use these ideas. There are very good designs among the 20 chosen at the first stage, but we are obliged by the rules of the competition to choose 20. For this reason, all the projects will be published in a book.'
And the point is exactly this: that all the participants — winners and losers alike — will share in this project, since they have taken pleasure in carrying it out. The architectural community across the world also awaits the chosen designs of this competition, to study and analyse them — much as has happened with many projects that did not win an architectural competition but found their place in the major developments of architecture, including Koolhaas's Jussieu project, Shirdel's Naara, and Greg Lynn's Yokohama.
The cleverness of the competition's organisers in a Third-World country like Egypt — where it might have seemed that they could simply invite 10 to 20 of the world's outstanding architects and call them to a competition — raised this competition to the level of an international transformation. Its first-place winner may very well be young people like the 31-year-old Renzo Piano and the 34-year-old Richard Rogers for the design of the Georges Pompidou Cultural Centre, or the 31-year-old Farshid Moussavi for the design of Yokohama Port — whose timely selection brought about historic transformations in architecture. Or even an experienced architect like Frank Gehry, whose Bilbao Guggenheim is still sending out aftershocks.
It is good also to think about this: that in this competition several thousand students, young architects and experienced architects had the chance to work alongside one another — they have taught and learned, thought and experienced. It is good to think also that, according to unofficial statistics, in Iran there are 9 000 graduates and 9 000 enthusiastic students of architecture — that is, about 18 000 people — and in a country in which the thirst to do work and gain experience is plainly visible, holding such a competition could have brought international standing to Iran's culture; not only was this opportunity readily passed over, but a non-recoverable financial cost was incurred. The sums paid to the consultants taking part in this competition exceeded the income of the Egyptian competition from registration fees by US$150 000 — apart from the fact that, undoubtedly, the costs of the organising consultant and the costs of running the competition have also been borne by its state client.
Hence this question arises: given the organisers' wish to draw on international experience, why was the competition not held internationally, and no attempt made to cover a major part of the costs of holding it through registration fees? Were these costs supplied from the country's surplus oil revenues, or have charitable associations paid for them?