The Nubia Museum was designed by the Egyptian architect Mahmoud al-Hakim and the Mexican architect Pedro Vasquez Ramirez who designed the museum's interior display. The museum was inaugurated in 1997, and won the Agha-Khan Award of Architecture in 2001. The total area of the complex is 50,000 square meters: 7,000 allocated for the building and 43,000 for the grounds. The architecture of the Museum and the enclosure walls are intended to evoke traditional Nubian villages' architecture as it was along the Nubian Nile before the region was floaded by Lake Nasser. The Museum contains a big part of the treasures and historic pieces discovered when Egyptologists and archaeologists participated in the "Nubian Rescue Campaign" led by the UNESCO, before the High Dam was built, to save the Nubian monuments from the waters of Lake Nasser.