Cairo Children's Civilisation & Creativity Centre
In 2005 Mallinson Architects won a competition to redesign the ‘Children's Museum’ in Cairo, as Consultant to the Major Projects division of the Egyptian Army. Following completion in 2012 the museum was renamed the ‘Children’s Civilisation & Creativity Centre’. The new museum welcomes up to 1200 school children each day from all over Egypt, including subsidized rates to help those from disadvantaged backgrounds. The completed museum received the Museums and Heritage 2012 International Award, and was the first African museum to be included in the Best in Heritage Conference 2013.
The museum provides interactive learning activities focused around four major learning themes:
- Where am I from? - History
- Who am I? - Ethnography
- Where am I going? - Geography
- How can I make a difference? – Science
Four gallery spaces are connected by a ramp that denotes a journey through time from the past to the future, the top floor featuring a projection dome with an exhibition on the history and future of Science and its links to Egypt. The museum garden models a Nilotic landscape, tracing the changing vegetation of the Nile Valley from flood plane to Savanna and Desert. The whole museum site uses low energy technologies.
Mallinson Architects are currently commissioning on behalf of the Cairo Children’s Museum a GAP analysis of the management, building requirements, and proposed new exhibitions and facilities of the Museum from the Science Museum Group in London.
As an extension to the existing museum, the New Science Centre was commissioned by Misr Bank in 2016, due for completion in 2019. The New Science Centre design, located within the existing museum garden, provides three floors of hands- on learning activities for up to 400 children a day. These activities address all the natural sciences, including biological and medical sciences on the ground floor, chemistry and computer science on the first floor, and physical sciences and astronomy on the first floor and rooftop, including an observatory and outdoor area for experiments. The rooftop doubles as an outdoor cinema for events and films. The project is being implemented in partnership with Cairo-based Archilab.
