Metropolitan Museum: Tomb of Perneb
Commissioned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the studio created a digital reconstruction for a film and the museum’s web site that contextualizes their fragment of the ruined Tomb of Perneb, built circa 2380–350 B.C. Installed at the museum in 1917 in a grand gallery designed by Richard Morris Hunt, museum visitors experience an Egyptian Old Kingdom tomb chapel where the relatives and friends of Perneb made offerings and preformed rituals designed to ensure him eternal life.
Though it is the only Old Kingdom tomb chapel in any museum that retains so much of its surrounding architecture, the Tomb of Perneb is still only a fragment of its original structure. An intricate digital reconstruction recreates both its geographic and architectural contexts: the stone structure returns to Egypt where it was nestled in a cemetery next to the “step” pyramid of King Djoser in Saqqara. Using historical documentation, the tomb is recreated in its entirety, allowing viewers to navigate its narrow lanes and intimate interiors much as the relatives and friends of Perneb did 4000 years ago.