For over fifteen years, ROTOR have been honing the art of demolition reuse as an architectural practice; their work has progressed from designing small scale demonstrative builds, creating a marketplace for reusable materials and elements, through to changing policy in Belgium and beyond. Their extensive mapping of architectural salvage dealers brought them to the Queen of the South — a surreal salvage wonderland of Gothic fragments and baroque ruins, and the domain of radical ‘anti-modern’ architect Marcel Raymaekers. In their recent publication Ad Hoc Baroque — excerpted below — ROTOR reveal Marcel Raymaekers iconoclastic and uniquely strange oeuvre, while uncovering pertinent lessons to be learned by designers today.
The current context differs drastically from the one in which Raymaekers built his practice in the 1960s, and the one in which the Queen of the South experienced its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s. Raymaekers worked in a time when traces from pre-war construction practices were still abundant in Limburg. Mobilising them, he was able to reject (for the most part) the postwar modern industrial framework, and to bypass the strictures of modern architectural practice. Into the third decade of the 21st Century, a couple of generations deep into the project of postwar globalised modernity and the (post) welfare state, we are emerging into an altogether different paradigm. Most of the conditions that made Raymaekers’ work possible have disappeared.
Into the third decade of the 21st Century [...] Most of the conditions that made Raymaekers’ work possible have disappeared.
There are no more striking miners or retired townsfolk to provide the cheap labour essential to working with old materials. While many of the labourers on Raymaekers’ construction sites signed up for such work because of their precarious economic conditions, it is clear that together with them, a tradition of self-reliance, ad hoc intelligence, and practical know-how is gone. One-man contractors – the kind of craftsmen who were active on many of Raymaekers’ sites – were faced with new costs linked to equipment, compliance, and liability. The threshold for practising as a contractor became higher.
Taking matters into one’s own hands has long since been given the label DIY. Although it allows for flexibility and spontaneity – reasons why it is so beloved by its practitioners – DIY is also to a large extent commodified and confined to interior projects. When Spinoye died in the late 1970s, a succession of similar companies traded at the same location, offering cheap salvaged materials to the community. But those were replaced in the early 90s by a branch of Brico, a chain of DIY stores that largely invented the market in Belgium. The materials on offer are exclusively new and standardised.
Finally, both the demand and supply of building antiques declined. The demolition wave unleashed by the 1958 World’s Fair, which became pretty much the go-to method for dealing with the built environment in Belgium, erased a large proportion of valuable prewar buildings; those that remain have since been protected. The 2000s marked the beginning of a new cycle: the demolition of buildings erected in the first decades after the Second World War, which had replaced the demolished prewar building stock that Raymaekers used to feed his reuse practice. The antique building materials that are still available, such as those remaining in the stock of QotS, are no longer in demand. They have given way to the homogeneous aesthetic that Jencks and Silver were resisting in Adhocism.
Informality and irregularity Raymaekers ruthlessly cut corners whenever it was the only way to realise his architecture. Queen of the South mostly functioned on unregistered – and therefore unprotected – labour, together with the immense efforts of his partners and his son. And for over 40 years, Raymaekers got away with barely paying any taxes on his profits and sales, all the while exhibiting his luxurious lifestyle in magazines, newspapers, and television reports. Raymaekers’ mindset regarding fiscal regulations wasn’t unique. Even to a seasoned tax evader, the brazen practices of QotS must have come across if not as unethical, then certainly as imprudent.
From Raymaekers’ working methods and oeuvre, we can distil a series of principles that will be indispensable for moving towards a more circular construction sector; while everyone agrees this is necessary, few are willing to confront the systemic difficulty of achieving it.
Whilst his financial practices – and much else besides – make it impossible to frame Raymaekers as a purely exemplary figure, the way he creatively reframed certain modern strictures in order to develop his architecture of reuse remains inspiring. As those strictures have made their grip ever tighter around the neck of reuse practices today, the lesson is even more urgent. From Raymaekers’ working methods and oeuvre, we can distil a series of principles that will be indispensable for moving towards a more circular construction sector; while everyone agrees this is necessary, few are willing to confront the systemic difficulty of achieving it. Raymaekers’ approach to building offers important lessons on how the reintroduction of used or otherwise unconventional materials in construction will necessitate a rethinking of ossified protocols everywhere, from the construction site to the design studio to the organisation of our material economy.
Recreating reuse ecosystems
Queen of the South lay at the heart of an extensive, pre-existing reuse ecosystem that Raymaekers tapped into, and helped develop. Demolition contractors had close contacts with wholesalers, who in turn had long lists of clients, tailored to the pieces on sale. Sites where streams of waste were handled or created, such as shipbreaking yards and sand and gravel quarries, were easily accessible for hunters such as Raymaekers and his friends. Salvage yards all over the country offered possibilities for the valorisation of discarded pieces. This network facilitating reuse has faded away. Recycling has emerged as the dominant practice. Materials salvaged by the shipbreaking industry, for instance, are now exclusively directed to recycling.
For inert building materials such as brick and natural stone, recycling is also the automatic option. Promoted as a sustainable solution leading us towards a circular economy, ‘recycling’ inert material means crushing it into aggregate, losing its original form and properties, along with the appearance developed sometimes over hundreds of years (bricks) or millions of years (natural stone).
Promoted as a sustainable solution leading us towards a circular economy, ‘recycling’ inert material means crushing it into aggregate, losing its original form and properties, along with the appearance developed sometimes over hundreds of years or millions of years.
In regulation, policy, monitoring, and rhetoric, reuse is often confused with, aligned with, or even replaced by recycling. Recycling is more compatible with large-scale material processing (mechanised demolition and waste sorting), which the current (linear) economy favours. It is more time and cost efficient, since it doesn’t necessitate cleaning, repair, and rejuvenation work. Crushing a material to the granular level doesn’t require many site precautions, and it quickly creates a manageable flux which can be absorbed easily into modern production and distribution chains. Equally important, integrating a recycled product into a construction project doesn’t require a different mindset than integrating a new material.
Recycling obviously is a viable and necessary strategy towards a world with better resource management. But the socio-economic and environmental consequences of recycling are not comparable with reuse: the former demands much more capital investment (heavy machinery) and far more energy, creates much less (interesting and skilled) work, and often produces material of inferior quality.
As it stands today, recycling is an adversary of reuse, not its complement. It is applied as a pass-partout solution which stands in the way of a much needed resurgence of reuse ecosystems, eating up budget and research resources.
As it stands today, recycling is an adversary of reuse, not its complement. It is applied as a pass-partout solution which stands in the way of a much needed resurgence of reuse ecosystems, eating up budget and research resources.
Enlisting heritage as an ally for reuse
From the point of view of today’s prevailing heritage ideology, Raymaekers’ work is a kind of horrorshow. His ad hoc assemblages violate all possible rules of stylistic coherence and historic integrity. But the paradox is that these assemblages are the vessels preserving hundreds of tons of precious components which, under business-as-usual, would have been crushed, buried, or burned, and are now instead there to be seen and studied, lived in and enjoyed. Raymaekers’ buildings have become unwitting memorials (Denkmäler in German) to the lost landscapes of pre-war Belgium and beyond. He proved that an innovative, totally un-solemn, living architecture is possible with them.
Raymaekers’ ad hoc assemblages violate all possible rules of stylistic coherence and historic integrity. But the paradox is that these assemblages are the vessels preserving hundreds of tons of precious components.
In Raymaekers’ work simmers a proposal to extend our apprehension of heritage, whereby the focus is no longer exclusively on preserving the integrity of valuable buildings, but equally on preserving the integrity of building subsystems – sets of building components – at last recognized as equally valuable. Since purely economic incentives to reuse them have disappeared in the globalised economy, we have to develop, on top of our appreciation for real estate (bonis immobilibus), a cultural environmental appreciation for mobile architectural goods (bonis mobilibus) – a category to which bricks, beams, and stones definitely belong, and which was enough to preserve their value and justify their reuse as a matter of course (and common sense) right up until the early 20th Century. From a binary apprehension of heritage, we have to evolve to a spectrum of preservation attitudes with room for other forms of value assignment (backed somehow by new legislation and policies).
We have to develop, on top of our appreciation for real estate (bonis immobilibus), a cultural environmental appreciation for mobile architectural goods (bonis mobilibus).
Physical and cultural qualities do not have to stand in the way of an elements’ rejuvenation and placement in a new ‘home’; rather, such qualities invite us to revisit the material production of bygone times, even if their buildings, as expressions of societal values, seem dated. Through Queen of the South, Raymaekers found a way to reuse and reinvent pre-war building elements and other types of ‘waste’ that the front of modernisation generated during the second half of the 20th Century. We will have to find a way to do the same for the ‘waste’ generated in the 21st Century, starting with a fine-grained evaluation of the seemingly anonymous modern(ist) buildings that define large parts of our surroundings, which are now vulnerable to erasure and replacement.
The notion of heritage would be a powerful ally in this regard, since finding new roles and meanings for old building components is as much a necessary ecological project as it is a healthy cultural one. It offers mediation with the past, while allowing for change. It allowed Raymaekers to present the emerging middle class with exclusive, personalised homes that couldn’t be more different from those in cookie-cutter developments. Who knows what possibilities lie in the reclaimed materials of today?
Bio
Rotor, founded in 2005, is a Brussels-based non-profit organisation specialised in the study of present-day material culture, with focus on the realm of construction. Through publications, lectures, and exhibitions, the members of Rotor develop critical positions on design, material resources, waste, and reuse. On a practical level, Rotor is also active as designers, circularity consultants, researchers, and tutors at several architecture schools across Europe. Since 2014, the spin-off Rotor DC has been active in the salvaging, processing, and selling of reclaimed building components.
Ad Hoc Baroque is (self-)published by Rotor. It was written by Arne Vande Capelle, Stijn Colon, Lionel Devlieger, and James Westcott, who edited the English version of the book. Original photography by Anja Hellebaut and Anthony De Meyere.
