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The dream-building
business
Jochen Kofahl had a dream of creating an
affordable means for people to build their dream
houses, schools and the other structures so
necessary in South Africa’s many far-flung
communities.
It didn’t take much to convince me that he was onto
something when he showed me how he planned to
reintroduce the use of earth as a building material.
For me that was the spark of genius. Here was a long-
forgotten material that over centuries has been used to
house people, their children and many of the treasures
of mankind. That was how Jochen’s dream became my
dream and later the dream of each successive employee
of the company.
However, this is not to say that the road we have
travelled these past 25 years has been smooth. Far from
it. We encountered many pitfalls and challenges along
the way but we held onto the dream and today we have a
successful and thriving business, helping people to fulfil
their own dreams.
To put that into context, in the Johannesburg of 25
years ago it was unheard of to use an earth block to build
anything. And to compound matters our system did so
without using mortar in between blocks! It was believed
to be a crazy idea.
For the most part our plans in 1988 were laughed at
but a few, a very few, individuals saw the potential and
As I look back over the past
quarter of a century, I realise that
what we have built at Hydraform
is not just a company, it’s a
dream factory and it all began
with a dream.
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