Remember the Carlton Centre, Africa’s tallest building for 46 years? The firm that built it just went into business rescue.

Concor, formerly Murray & Roberts Construction, has been building South Africa since 1948. This week, what it means, and what to do if a client of yours ever goes the same way.

For balance, some proper good news. A water plant built in modules, like giant Lego, now pumps out 50 million litres a day for Hammanskraal.

And the Golden Gate Bridge came very close to being painted like a bumblebee. We are not making this up.

Kettle on? Good.

Let’s build better. 👇

What's hot. What's moving. What you need to know.

Concor, formerly Murray & Roberts Construction, entered business rescue on 5 October.

If you read our skyscraper edition, you will remember that Murray & Roberts built the Carlton Centre, the firm that later became Concor. Its track record goes back to 1948, with names like Cape Town’s Salt River Bridge, the Soweto Motorway, and Durban’s Pavilion Mall on the list.

Now it is in business rescue. Concor’s own website carries the formal notices for several group companies, including Concor Holdings, Concor Construction, and Concor Mining Services, along with the appointment of business rescue practitioners.

Business rescue is not liquidation. It is a legal process under the Companies Act where a practitioner takes control of a struggling company and tries to restructure it, so it can keep trading. Some companies come out the other side, some do not.

A local twist. In 2025, Concor said its work on the Msikaba Bridge, our cable car story from a few weeks back, was well advanced. Its list of jobs also included wind farms in the Northern Cape. How the rescue affects any individual project has not been made public, so we are not going to guess. Solid foundations for a wind farm. 👇

An opinion piece in Mining Weekly this week put the bigger question bluntly. South Africa is planning an infrastructure boom, but its big contractors have been thinning out for years, so who is actually going to build it?

For the trade, the practical lesson is closer to home. When a big contractor goes into rescue, the people who feel it first are usually the subcontractors and suppliers waiting to be paid.

So in this week’s Build better, we cover what to do if one of your clients ever lands in business rescue.

Rescue is not the end, but your paperwork had better be in order.

Hammanskraal waited years for clean water. A modular plant helped get it there faster.

After the 2023 cholera outbreak in Hammanskraal, north of Pretoria, the Department of Water and Sanitation, Magalies Water, and the City of Tshwane needed more clean water, and fast. Instead of building a conventional treatment works from scratch, they went modular.

The Klipdrift package plant was built in 4 phases, each module adding about 12.5 million litres a day. Fully commissioned, it adds 50 million litres a day, taking the Klipdrift site from 42 to 92 million litres a day. Government set aside R758 million for the project.

That 50 million litres a day is about 20 Olympic swimming pools, every single day.

Here is the clever bit. A package plant squeezes the steps of a traditional water treatment works into a single modular unit. Infrastructure News describes Klipdrift as Africa’s largest package water treatment plant, and the first in the world to combine dissolved air flotation and sand filtration in a single modular system.

To save time, the team also reused existing infrastructure at the old Klipdrift plant next door wherever it could. President Ramaphosa formally commissioned the plant on Mandela Day, 18 July.

It is not the whole fix. The Rooiwal works upstream still needs its upgrade, and Hammanskraal keeps growing. But for anyone in water, civils, or modular building, it is proof that modular can work at serious scale.

Bolt it together, switch it on, fill 20 pools a day. Not bad.

That famous orange? It was meant to be the undercoat.

When the steel for the Golden Gate Bridge arrived in San Francisco in the 1930s, it was coated in a reddish orange primer to protect it. Everyone assumed the final coat would be grey, silver, or black, like most bridges. The US Navy had other ideas, and pushed for black and yellow stripes so ships could spot it in the fog. The Army Air Corps reportedly fancied red and white stripes, like a candy cane.

Consulting architect Irving Morrow saw the orange primer against the fog, the hills, and the sea, and fell for it. He wrote a 29 page report on colour and lighting to win over the bridge’s board, with letters from locals backing him up. The colour, now called International Orange, has stayed on the bridge since it opened in 1937.

The lesson for anyone who has ever had a client say “actually, leave it like that”. Sometimes the primer is the finish.

That’s a wrap on edition 19.

The Build Brief, powered by Supply Sphere Solutions, rounds up the news, tips, and tools that help you build better, minus the bumblebee stripes.

Know someone in the trade who would enjoy this? Forward it on. Every past edition is waiting on our website, from Roman concrete to rice mortar.

👉 www.thebuildbrief.co.za

Same time next week.

Keep building better! 👍