Kengo Kuma and Associates have just been awarded second place in an architecture competition to design the expansion and renovation of the Egyptian Museum in Torino, Italy. It served for many decades as the primary civic space in Turin, with its public areas closed off from the rest of the city. Kengo Kuma’s proposal aims to recreate the public plaza, a city center covered by a thin glass canopy. Founded in 1824 and is the oldest museum for Ancient Egyptian culture, the Egyptian Museum in Torino held a competition earlier this year and received entries by Pininfarina Architecture, Carlo Ratti Associati, and Snøhetta. The winning project by OMA / David Gianotten and Andreas Karavanas will transform the museum into a cultural space, creating one covered courtyard and a series of connected urban rooms within the existing settlement.
The goal of the roof's design in the Kengo Kuma proposal is to reinvent the covered gallery typology in a modern fashion while maintaining its continuity. The rooftop, which takes its design cues from Miura Ori's structural model, a method to fold flat surfaces into a smaller area, comprises a rigid glass structural system that functions like a continuous slab. The new roof can completely cover the courtyard without any vertical supports because of its mechanical behavior of folds, mountains, and valleys.
The glazed roof's architecture produces a free space that is adaptable, inclusive, and capable of providing continuity. Furthermore, it allows the introduction of a network of public and pedestrian spaces directly connected to the Museum. The primary purpose of the new courtyard is to establish a link with the network of covered porticos and passages in the city, establishing a new urban axis included in the system of soft mobility.
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OMA Wins Competition to Transform World’s Oldest Museum for the Ancient Egyptian Culture in Turin, ItalyThe courtyard design showcases the infamous Egyptian garden as the area's focal point. The scheme reinforces the Egyptian garden's presence by reusing the two existing voids, now occupied by skylights, imagining one on each side of the courtyard and integrating them into the circulation system and access to the basement. The newly conceived garden, now hosting two additional amphitheaters, is firmly established as a location for close encounters with nature and learning about Egyptian culture.
Infused with a sensation of discovery, the entrance to the basement uses light to guide the visitor through the exhibition. The use of light and shadow, which alludes to Egyptian iconography, connects the courtyard to the new exhibit in the basement, immersing the visitor completely in the surrounding scenography. Finally, the visitor enters the stone gallery on the lower level, where the artifacts in the collection of Egyptian heritage is exhibited, followed by a new multi-media room.
Kengo Kuma and Associates was founded in 1954 and has since been focused on creating architectures that widen the relationships between nature, technology, and human beings. The studio recently proposed a scheme for The National Archaeological Museum in Athens, Greece. In 2022, the Japan-based office unveiled the design for its first residential tower in the United States, located on the oceanfront of Miami Beach.
