By David Marks of MEWA in Darling, Western Cape In the May 2024 issue of WoodBiz Africa, I wrote an article about the extraordinary engineering of the De Havilland Mosquito. This World War II British…
By Joy Crane The annual Wood Conference in Cape Town is the only timber-focused event in South Africa that has brought together a network of over 1000 people from diverse professions and interests. It is…
Over 1000 professionals, academics, business owners, investors, sawmillers and students interested in using timber in the built environment joined the Kuratle family to celebrate the 15th annual Wood Conference in Cape Town in February. The…
By David Marks, CEO of MEWA Let me tell you about a project that was a rollercoaster adventure in problem-solving, complex mathematics, engineering across many disciplines, creativity, craftsmanship and teamwork. I couldn’t be prouder of…
The Lantern House community centre in Johannesburg’s Eldorado Park is an example of adaptive reuse that repurposed and upgraded the defunct and fire-damaged Goud Street Substation into an aesthetically pleasing community centre using cross-laminated timber…
South Africa’s furniture industry is grappling with a surge of undervalued imports that distort market pricing and undermine fair competition. These imports are often declared under incorrect Harmonised System (HS) tariff codes, which mask the…
Austro Woodworking is back with a new team and a renewed focus on Biesse‘s high-end, technologically advanced Italian-manufactured machines like its well-known Stream edgebanding and Rover CNC machines. The new company’s director has assembled a…
Wood-based building products and design processes come in many forms. In the latest Talking Timber online seminar, three approaches to architecture were discussed. Leon Pienaar explained how Tshwane University of Technology’s (TUT) students experiment with…
The superstructure for the four-storey CheiChei Living building, which is Africa’s first cross-laminated timber (CLT) hybrid structure with more than two levels has been completed and fit-out is well underway. The first residents are scheduled…
NMU’s creative duo Noa Solomon and Rudolph Botha won the 2024 National Timber Design Competition with their Blooming Branches design incorporating engineered timber to vertically extend the Forestry and Agricultural Biotechnology Institute (FABI) building at the University…
The highly anticipated second Timber Construction Conference again showed that “growing timber connections” involves human relationships, supply chain strength, environmental stewardship, economic sustainability and transdisciplinary collaboration across knowledge domains. The 230-strong enthusiastic group of architects,…
The annual Timber Construction Colloquium was an instructive forerunner to the Growing Timber Connections conference, presenting multiple research topics on improving the quality, knowledge and applications of engineered timber. The increasing number of master’s, doctorate and post-doctoral…
