The World's Most Advanced Science Museum Could Be Coming to Cairo

The past few years have seen a number of new museums with inventive façades expressly designed to hint at the treasures that lie within. Think of the Kengo Kuma–designed museum in Manila , which looks like a set from Jurassic Park and houses more than 4,000 years of history in the Philippines. Soon to join this subset of cultural institutions is Egypt’s Science City, a futuristic museum complex planned for the western side of Cairo. It was announced on Monday that London firm Weston Williamson had the winning entry in the high-profile competition to design the 1,345,500-square-foot science center, notably beating out Zaha Hadid Architects , whose Stone Towers is already something of a landmark in Cairo. From above, the cluster of would-be buildings, which includes a planetarium, an observation tower, and a conference center, will be dotted with white circular structures and green patches of landscape. The result is a futuristic looking structure that seamlessly combined indoor and outdoor spaces.

A rendering of the museum’s interiors shows a shark suspended in the air and a double helix moving through a stairwell.

Commissioned by the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (a Snøhetta -designed library in Alexandria), the new center will celebrate and fortify scientific innovation in Egypt, a mission embodied by the scale and imagination behind the design. Perhaps Weston Williamson cofounder Chris Williamson put it best in a statement about the project: “Needless to say that Egypt has a unique cultural heritage, but we were also attracted by the ambition of the project.”