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Resend of our Tuesday publication.
Welcome to The Build Brief
No pipeline numbers this week.
Instead we went digging through construction history for the weird, the record breaking, and the frankly unbelievable.
Did you know Johannesburg's tallest building crown changed hands 4 times in just 8 years, partly out of pure spite between 2 rival developers?
Or that Roman concrete can heal its own cracks, 2000 years after it was poured, using a trick modern concrete companies are only just figuring out?
Grab a coffee. This one is for the trivia nerds and the site foremen alike.
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A PM can summarize research, draft a PRD, and mock up a prototype before lunch. The hard part starts when the team has to decide what actually gets built.
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AI helps PMs move faster. Jira Product Discovery helps the whole team build with confidence.
A must-have for our Afrikaans builders with a sense of humor 👇
The Site Briefing 👷♂️
What's hot. What's moving. What you need to know.
Johannesburg fought over its skyline for decades, literally 🏙️
Here is a fun one for the history buffs on site. Between 1929 and 1937, the title of Johannesburg's tallest building changed hands at least 4 times. The Barbican Building held it first at 42.67 metres, until the developers of Astor Mansions deliberately added twin spires just to nudge past them at 45.72 metres. Pure spite, brilliantly executed.
The Carlton Centre eventually settled the argument in 1973, reaching 223 metres and holding the title of tallest building in Africa for 46 years, an almost unbeatable innings. It has 50 floors, 23 lifts, and was built by Murray and Roberts, the same firm that later became Concor.
Then in 2019, The Leonardo in Sandton finally dethroned it at 234 metres, just 11 metres taller, after a build that started in 2015 and took 4 years to top out.
Not to be outdone on weirdness, Ponte City in Berea holds its own title as Africa's tallest residential building at 173 metres, with a hollow cylindrical core built specifically to let light reach every apartment.
In the 1980s and 1990s that same core was reportedly filled with several storeys of dumped rubbish during the building's roughest years, before a full revitalisation turned it back into one of Johannesburg's most recognisable landmarks.
South Africa currently has 50 buildings taller than 100 metres, and Durban alone has 18 of them, more than Johannesburg or Cape Town.
46 years unbeaten, toppled by 11 metres, and a core full of rubbish along the way. Skylines have stories.
Blu Dot surpasses 2,000% ROAS with self-serve CTV ads
Blu Dot used Roku Ads Manager to drive incredible results for its furniture sales event. Its strategy hinged on custom audiences and retargeting, where intent was strongest.
“Roku has been a top performer,” said Blu Dot’s Claire Folkestad. “We have seen…CPMs lower than any other CTV partner we've worked with.”
The construction world record you did not know existed 🔨
Somewhere out there, someone is still proud of hammering 24 nails in 60 seconds.
That is the actual Guinness World Record, held by Willi Maier from Austria, and it puts into perspective just how many nails a normal build actually gets through.
An average American sized house of around 111 square metres uses roughly 12,000 nails, so even a record breaking pace would take a very long weekend.
Bricks are no less dramatic. The Empire State Building alone contains around 10 million of them, and it went up in 1 year and 45 days, a pace that still humbles modern schedules almost a century later.
Cranes have their own bragging rights too. The world's tallest crane, the Liebherr 357 HC-L, has a maximum hook height of 53.3 metres, tall enough to lift materials well above most mid rise buildings in a single reach.
And then there is the story nobody in quality control wants to hear. In 1983, a construction crew set a world record by building a full 3 bedroom house in just 3 days, purely as a publicity stunt. It was then sold to an unsuspecting family, who were never told about its speed built origins.
Uneven slabs, burst pipes, a flawed roof, and crooked doors followed shortly after. A useful reminder that a record on the box does not always mean quality inside it.
Somewhere between Willi Maier's nail gun arm and that 3 day house is basically the entire emotional range of this industry, showing off and cutting corners, sometimes in the same decade.
Next time a client asks you to rush a job, you now have a cautionary tale on standby... 😏
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The 2000 year old concrete trick modern builders are stealing back 🏛️
The Pantheon in Rome has the largest unreinforced concrete dome on earth, poured almost 1900 years ago, and it is still standing. Modern concrete, by comparison, often needs major repairs within 50 years. For a long time nobody could explain the gap.
In 2023, researchers at MIT and Harvard finally worked it out. Roman builders used quicklime mixed at high heat, a process called hot mixing, which leaves tiny white mineral chunks called lime clasts scattered through the concrete. For centuries these were dismissed as sloppy workmanship.
Turns out they were the opposite of sloppy. When a crack eventually forms and water gets in, it dissolves those lime clasts and redeposits calcium carbonate right into the gap, sealing the crack before it can spread. The concrete was quietly healing itself the entire time, nobody just knew to look for it.
Researchers are now working on bringing hot mixing back into modern concrete, and MIT's own team says even adding 50 to 100 years to a structure's lifespan would mean less demolition, less maintenance, and far less material used over time.
The Romans were not lucky.
They just understood their materials better than we gave them credit for.
The Digital Toolbox 🛠️🤖
The free app that tells you when the rain is actually coming 🌧️
Every builder has poured on the one day the forecast lied. South Africa's weather apps are not exactly famous for local accuracy.
Rainboo is a free app built specifically for South African locations, with a sharp focus on precipitation down to street level. It shows rain forecasts for the next 2 hours in millimetres per hour, not just a vague cloud icon.
Also included, hourly and 5 day forecasts, wind, temperature, and a 3 day fire index, genuinely useful heading into the drier months. No Roman engineering required, just a decent rain map before you schedule tomorrow's pour.
Free, built for South Africa, no self healing concrete needed if you check it first.
The free tool for when metres and feet stop making sense 📐
Between metres, feet, and the odd imperial spec sheet from an old drawing, unit conversion is the quiet tax every builder pays without noticing.
ConvertUnits is a free, no account, no app download unit converter covering length, area, volume, weight, and pressure, built for exactly this kind of quick lookup on site.
Type in a value, pick your units, and it converts instantly, whether you are translating an old imperial drawing, checking a supplier's spec sheet, or settling an argument about whether 223 metres really is taller than 730 feet.
Completely free, works in any browser, no sign up required.
Supply that works without fail.
Curated sourcing, trusted supplier relationships, and supply chain management built for large-scale operations across Southern Africa and beyond.
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Wrapping up the site 👷🏾♂️
Thanks for reading our 13th edition.
Whether you’re building a dog house or the world’s tallest building…
The Build Brief powered by Supply Sphere Solutions is here to curate news, tips and tools to help you build better.
Pass it on to a friend in the trade and on our website you can find all our previous newsletters for easy reference.
Catch you next week.
Always be building better! 👍
