Fearing that a foreign power would appropriate the immense phosphate reserves that were appearing in Morocco’s central region, in 1920 the French protectorate set up the office that is now the OCP Group, an industrial giant that is key to the country’s economy.

As part of its social work and under royal auspices, in 2013 it created University Mohammed VI Polytechnic in Ben Guerir, the city where one of the conglomerate’s mines is located, and Ricardo Bofill was tasked to design its campus, for which he drew from the ksour of the Atlas Mountains to create a grid of streets and squares with bold, earthy shapes...[+]