The Project by Franco Albini for the Graeco-Roman Museum at Alexandria

Franco Albini and Franca Helg were renowned architects who designed a few museums in Italy during the reconstruction after the Second World War. Over ten years, from 1962 to 1972, the duo undertook several museum projects in Egypt. In Italy, they repurposed existing buildings to create new spatial arrangements. Establishing a link between the architectural and the artistic heritage of a given city, these museums highlighted the fundamental values of an urban identity in the process of remaking. In Egypt instead, after the Revolution of 1952, Albini and Helg’s projects offered insights into the role of museums in the nation-building process. This contribution focuses on the project for a new museum in Alexandria, conceived by Albini and Helg in collaboration with the Egyptian architect Ali Labib Gabr. The team envisaged a “square Guggenheim” grafted inside a 19th-century bastion. This visionary project placed the museum in the reality of Alexandria at the time. The former fortifications lined a “ring” of public structures and parks between the centre and the periphery.