Sultan Qaboos University, Oman

This university turnkey project was led by the contractor Cementation International for whom YRM International, a multidisciplinary firm in London, was the designer. Since I was the only farmer’s boy on the team, I was the project architect for the College of Agriculture and the University Farm. The program was developed by faculty from Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas.

A strange anomaly in the development of the 13-hectare farm was that it was being ‘created’ with one meter of top soil over the rocky base. Regardless of where 130,000 cubic meters may have come from (my guess was Uganda), it was surely not very educational to have an utterly atypical landscape on which to teach agriculture to people who would be going back to grow crops and raise animals in more natural landscapes.