When Róisín Heneghan received a phone call 22 years ago announcing that her four-person architecture firm had been chosen to design one of the world’s largest museums, she thought it was a prank. She called the official back to ensure it wasn’t some elaborate ruse.
“It was unreal,” she recalled in a video interview from Dublin, Ireland, where she runs Heneghan Peng Architects alongside husband Shih-Fu Peng. “We got the call, and I put down the phone — because in those days, it was all by phone or by letters and post — and I said, ‘I think we won.’”
Eighteen months earlier, in 2002, Egypt’s government had launched an international design competition for its Grand Egyptian Museum, a…
