Fabrication Africa creates beautiful objects with a social conscience and a technological heritage

The NEST bowl from Fabrication Africa is manufactured from laser cut walnut

JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA –25 August 2009.

Fabrication Africa’s NEST bowl is the first in a new range of sculptural home objects with a social conscience. It combines the vibrant, raw beauty of Africa, with the precision and purity of contemporary design. The components of the intricate bowl are laser-cut from walnut wood and then assembled by hand in Pretoria.

Assembly of the bowls is done by a local charity that assists homeless and destitute people in informal settlements. This helps the poorest of the urban poor, in line with Fabrication Africa’s vision of creating objects with African values and a job-creation focus.

The NEST was designed by the international award-winning design team at Readymade, led by Tasos Calantzis and Frederick Kruger.

Designers of the NEST bowl; Frederick Kruger and Tasos Calantzis from Readymade

The NEST is inspired by Readymade’s collaboration with MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology ) Professor, Neil Gershenfeld. Prof. Gershenfeld explains in his book, FAB, that instead of sending megatons of products around the world from factory to consumer, we could be sending electronic data around the world in seconds and making the products we need in our basements using personal fabricators.

To prototype this idea he established a global network of fabrication laboratories (FABlabs) in cities from New York and Barcelona, to Pabal (India), Soshanguve (South Africa) and Sekondi-Takoradi (Ghana). In these laboratories there is free public access to all manner of ways to create new objects.

The NEST bowl is Fabrication Africa’s way of bringing this vision to life. Working with the FABlab in Soshanguve, South Africa, Fabrication Africa created the NEST as the start of a range of distinctive new products which embrace social conscience and precision technology. 

Top view of the NEST bowl

The NEST bowl can be purchased at:

Cape Town - Origin, 3 Jarvis Street, De Waterkant, Cape Town, 021- 418 0368.

Johannesburg – Lexon Store, Morningside Shopping Centre, cnr Rivonia & Outspan Rd, Morningside, 087 - 940 3889

Pretoria – Readymade, Suite 1A2 1st Floor Building 1B Centurion Gate, Cnr John Vorster & Akkerboom Street, Centurion – 012 - 643 0996

For more information please contact Anya at 012 643 0996 or via email at anya@trstrl.com