Geoff (from up north office of Stephen George & Partners) headed to Oman at the weekend for some pitching and a visit to the Salalah site to see progress on the HQ for Salalah Free Zone Company.
From outside the site, which is 600 ha and is currently having a 8km perimeter wall erected, it looks a bit insignificant (it’s the first building on the site), but get close up and you begin to wonder if they’ve got the scale wrong. But no, it’s just a humongous building!
Gross floor area is about 250,000 square feet and comprises buried parking the circular agora garden and office rising from one to six storeys at the top of the rotunda. The atrium is 4 storeys high and has a glass roof with solar PVs and 10m palm trees and a water fountain.
Construction has reached first floor level and it already looks quite huge; you get a real sense of how the space, light and volume is going to work, even when it is peeing down with rain – which it does in Salalah!
They don’t build quite as fast as us, but by Christmas the form of the building should really begin to take shape and the upper levels will be there. Gulp!
