Each project begins with what the client brought, then what the engineering turned on, then what was built. The photographs are from the sites themselves.
P.01Five-star hotel, KitisuruP.02CBK Pension Towers, NairobiP.03Imarika Sacco office block, KilifiP.04ACK Trinity Muthua housing, UthiruP.05Kipeto Phase 2 corridor, KajiadoP.06Wind delivery corridorsP.07Fortescue green hydrogenP.08African Harbour, MauritaniaP.09Four-Town water supplyP.10Kanyakwar & KinanieP.11Works from the fieldP.12Where the work sitsLive build · Structural engineer
Curved guest wings set around an internal courtyard. Curved geometry does not sit quietly in a reinforced-concrete frame: columns, beams and slab edges have to follow the plan radius while still carrying floor and roof loads to ground on a live, occupied-street site.
The frame is cast in stages, from foundation and ground slab up through the curved balcony wings to the roof-slab formwork. Each pour is checked before it is committed: reinforcement laid to the drawing, formwork lines holding the intended curve, and the load path from the balcony edge back into the primary frame kept honest.
Rising in reinforced concrete behind its scaffolding. The curved wings and courtyard are readable in the frame before any finish is applied. The build is ongoing.
The engineering in detail
On a straight, simply supported slab the tension steel sits low, near the soffit, and the formwork is flat. A cantilevered balcony reverses that. The slab bends the other way, so the main tension steel runs across the top. If that top mat is trodden down or fixed too low before the pour, the overhang has lost the very steel that holds it up.
Curve the balcony in plan and it gets harder again. The bars must be set to the radius, the formwork closes on itself, and the concrete has to travel and compact around a bend without segregating or leaving voids at the tightest radius.
Getting that right is a decision taken on site with the reinforcement still exposed, which is why every pour on this build is released only after the steel has been checked against the schedule.
The back-of-house wing is in its second phase, so the frame is not a single lift but a sequence of pours that must knit into work already standing and hardened. Each level repeats the same cycle of checks.
Releasing formwork is decided on the concrete’s gained strength, not the calendar. On a phased build that judgement recurs on every floor, and it is where programme pressure and a structural fact meet.
Machine-cut stone is set as infill between the concrete lines the frame defines, so the frame geometry has to be right before any finish is committed.
Structural engineer on the live build, site review included: present as the reinforced concrete is placed rather than handing over drawings and leaving.
High-rise · Part of the structural design team
Twin office towers of 27 storeys over six basement levels in central Nairobi. Six basement levels are not simply six more floors: they are a deep excavation to retain, a water table to hold back, and the point where the whole weight of the towers is gathered and passed into the ground.
The work sat in the reinforced-concrete frame, the basement and foundation systems, and the detailing of members carrying the towers down through the substructure. Condition surveys and review of construction materials and workmanship ran alongside as the frame went up. What is decided below ground fixes what the skyline can carry above it.
Complete, and standing on the Nairobi skyline.
Structural design
A 10-storey office building for a savings and credit cooperative. Office floors want long, uninterrupted spans and clear circulation; a tall frame wants columns and cores placed to carry lateral load. The two demands pull in opposite directions.
The structural scheme fixed where columns could run, how floor spans met office use, where cores provided stability, and how loads reached the foundations without obstructing circulation or services. The architectural grid was used as a decision tool rather than traced. Settling those relationships early gave the architect, services engineers and cost team a scheme they could coordinate before changes became expensive.
Residential development · Design and supervision
The Anglican Church of Kenya's Trinity Muthua congregation set out to raise a residential apartment development in Uthiru as an income and housing asset for the church. An institution building for the long term needs the structural design and the site discipline to come from one accountable engineer, so that what is drawn and what is cast on the ground stay the same building.
Eng. Ombogo carried both the structural design and the construction supervision. The structure combines load-bearing stone masonry with reinforced-concrete elements: column starter cages rise from the footings, and cast concrete balconies and floor slabs tie the masonry superstructure together as the walls climb.
The build was taken up floor by floor, each stage settled before the next was committed. Reinforcement was checked against the drawings before a pour, and the masonry walls were carried up behind working scaffolding. The photographs on this sheet come from those site inspections.
Complete. The photographs record the stages the block passed through under supervision, from starter columns off the footings to the masonry superstructure and the rendered block behind its scaffolding.
Transport route work · Phase 2 upcoming
The question was not where the turbines would stand but whether the blades could physically get there.
The route was walked and surveyed waypoint by waypoint. Swept-path analysis in AutoTURN tested each turn against the envelope a blade sweeps through it; vertical clearances were checked under every structure; pavements and minor crossings were assessed against the weight of a loaded blade carrier. Where the corridor failed, the study named the modification rather than the obstruction.
The corridor work supports the upcoming Kipeto Phase 2 development. The road interventions are named and set before any transport moves.
Route studies · Sirius Project Logistics
Each of these corridors was walked for the same cargo class and broke in a different place. Together they are the case for surveying a route rather than classifying it.
Eng. Ombogo surveyed the delivery route and tested the road alignment and swept paths for Vestas components. The constraints were translated into a traffic management plan and a road-modification and upgrade cost matrix rather than left as unpriced observations.
The question
Which interventions were required for component movement?
What it produced
Traffic controls, a modification schedule and upgrade costs.
Public-road and site-access options for this AMEA Power development were assessed, including the swept paths, gradients, transport risk and pavement condition. The study identified where rehabilitation or new access-road construction had to meet the applicable Kenyan rural-road basis.
The question
Could the route and the final access carry the delivery configuration?
What it produced
Transport-risk findings and pavement requirements.
As Lead Civil Engineering Consultant, Eng. Ombogo reviewed the public and site-access roads for wind-component delivery. The assessment turned on turning radii, gradients, transport risk and access-road pavement: the conditions that decide whether the final kilometres are genuinely feasible.
The question
Where would geometry or pavement interrupt the delivery path?
What it produced
A constraint register and access-road requirements.
Pre-feasibility · Sirius Project Logistics
A proposed 300 MW green-hydrogen development asked a harder logistics question than a wind farm, because it spread across five counties: Taita Taveta, Nakuru, Baringo, Isiolo and Marsabit. Eng. Ombogo led the engineering team for the pre-feasibility study.
The task was to establish, honestly, how plant, equipment and materials could actually reach candidate sites scattered over that ground. A road-versus-rail comparison, road-suitability findings, drainage and upgrade requirements, and a transport environmental assessment gave the project team a physical basis for logistics planning, rather than an optimistic line drawn on a map.
Pre-feasibility complete.
Road and rail feasibility · Kuehne + Nagel
Construction cargo had to reach an inland site in Mauritania. The corridor from Port Nouadhibou towards Zouerat is served by road and by the Iron Ore Train, and the two options fail in different ways: the road has hazards and pinch points, the railway has capacity and cargo-handling constraints.
Eng. Ombogo assessed the road corridor and the feasibility of moving construction cargo by rail, weighing the road hazards and pinch points against railway capacity and handling limits. The answer was not a preference but a comparison the client could act on.
Road findings and rail-feasibility advice, framed as a combined-plan option rather than a single recommendation.
Water-supply design
Water-supply works serving four towns. The task was not to identify a need but to carry one technical basis intact through three decisions that each use it differently.
Feasibility compares viable systems and closes information gaps; final design fixes the coordinated solution; the contract documents turn it into work a contractor can price. If the assumptions shift between those stages, the capacity, quantities and interfaces stop describing the same project, so the discipline is keeping them aligned across all three. Supervision on the Kenchic works and the Eldoret-area programme ran alongside.
Review and audit
Two named jobs where the question was whether an existing design, or an existing building, held together.
A structural design review for residential apartments. A review is not a second set of calculations prepared in isolation; it asks whether the stated design basis, loads, analysis model, load paths, member checks and drawings agree with one another and with the brief. Where they diverge, the review says so.
A structural integrity audit for a residential maisonette. The audit starts from the question driving the inspection, compares available drawings with the observed geometry and condition, identifies where testing or opening-up is needed, and traces every concern back to its effect on the load path.
Site record
Construction seen across a decade of site work in Kenya. The captions describe the engineering in the frame.
Selected projects across Kenya and Mauritania.
