A brand new capital – in the middle of the desert! And an Icon building – a Taj Mahal, or a Sydney Operahouse that will be the gateway to the city and a symbol to the entire world! This is what His Highness Sheikh Saud Bin Saqr Al Qasimi in The United Arab Emirate Ras Al Khaimah has commissioned. The Norwegian architectural firm Snøhetta has been invited to present their vision for this uniqe and gigantic project. In this film we follow Snøhetta and its director Kjetil Thorsen in their bid for adventurous and ground-breaking architectural challenges in the Arab sands of Ras Al Khaimah."I don’t believe in learning from experience” claims Kjetil Thorsen, ”Most experience is based on negative experience; on things that can’t be done, things that aren’t possible”. The Snøhetta Architects on the dockside of Oslo suddenly gets a surprising invitation. HH Sheik Saud Bin Saqr al Qasimi in the Arab Emirate Ras Al Khaimah invites them to come up with a suggestion for a master plan for a new city! And the new city going to be situated in he middle of the desert! The invitation is adventurous. But Snøhetta is not the only architects bidding to be master planers for the new desert city... The Snøhetta Architects are most known for the Library of Alexandria and the New Opera House in Oslo. On an international scale they are small, still they stand out as one of the twenties most referred architects of the world. All their projects get published. Most of them are characterized as . So are the architects working methods. HH Sheik Saud has big dreams. In his Emirate, Ras Al Khaimah, not much has happened while everything has happened in the neighbor emirate Dubai. Ras al Khaimah has no oil, and HH wants to build a new city in order to create growth and expansion also in his Emirate. Therefore he hires the world’s most leading architects and puts his most trusted man, Dr Khater Massaad to lead the work. The film follows closely the adventurous process in a historical moment for the little Emirate. There are major cultural and esthetical differences between those assigning the project and the architects. But the ability and willingness to dream think and create in large scale they do have in common.