SSwaying skylights jut out from the sloping roof of a house in the Belgian countryside, resembling an army of slugs crawling across the terracotta tiles. It turns out these bulbous glass cupolas once served as cockpits for Lockheed fighter jets, but now they bring light to this amazing pyramid-shaped home, made with tar wood reclaimed from old boats and The interior is illuminated by a carved hearth. From recovered bricks.
In a nearby suburb, a huge ornate stone bay window, salvaged this time from a Brussels townhouse, hangs like an oversized trophy from the façade of an angular modern home. Porthole windows flank an arched stone entryway that opens into the interior, where aged pine beams fan out to the ceiling above a black fireplace made of ship’s steel. A pointed-arch doorway recovered from the church leads to more luxurious rooms, all of which are stuffed with objects. exhibition of objects.
These are just two of the many magpie creations by Marcel Reimakers, the maverick Belgian architect who built more than 100 homes, almost entirely from recycled materials, during his nearly 50-year career . These are not heritage projects incorporating carefully selected bits of architectural salvage, but rather wild fantasies of the most unlikely combinations, noisy assemblages drawn from different eras and anarchic in scale and style. collaged with abandon.
A huge stone porch, stripped from a condemned manor house, meets a low cottage-like eave. Reclaimed brick walls undulate and meet a wavy roof made of mismatched tiles. From the redundant pulpit, a staircase spirals to a boudoir of unfathomable grandeur, where a kaleidoscopic mirrored ceiling floats above a dreamy bathtub, creating a symphony of marble. It’s like an architectural version of the Exquisite Corpse game, with mismatched building parts bolted together with Frankensteinian glee.
These dazzling visions of upcycled luxury accompany an exhibition at Antwerp’s De Singel Center for the Arts, illustrating the little-known work of this outsider architect, called Ad Hoc Baroque. has been compiled into a new book titled “. It is the culmination of research conducted by Rotor, a design collaboration focused on material reuse and who happened to come across Raymakers in 2011 while mapping the European building salvage business.
As they were driving along the N75 motorway, about halfway between Hasselt and Genk in the canton of Limburg, their attention was drawn to a pair of 8-meter-high neo-Gothic steel columns. , I noticed a huge illuminated crown advertising it. bowwantik (antique architecture) and Esthetician Largeving Under the interesting banner of (Aesthetic Consulting), Woncultus (Worship for living).
Blue limestone cornices, ornate steel trusses, and grand oak doors set you back in the garden, creating a vast, cartoonish mansion that looks like a mix of country mansion and haunted castle. i got you. This is the Queen of the South, named after the retired paddle steamer whose starboard fascia adorned the facade. It was a lavishly stocked warehouse and the seat of the court of House Raymaker’s pioneering kingdom. He declared bankruptcy in 2014 after being convicted of tax evasion, but at age 91 he still lives there as a tenant of the former Empire.
As the authors explain, the architects conceived this dreamlike complex in 1972 as an immersive experience, designed to seduce and conquer visitors. Potential customers are looking to “not just buy a product, but to reconsider what they want out of life and how their home and the things in it can provide that.” “They will be induced into appropriate states of mind (surprise, ecstasy, obedience, status anxiety).” It was a life-sized catalog for the middle class to buy accessories to dream of aristocracy and build their own fancy suburban castles.
Raymakers’ business model was unusual. If you buy enough reclaimed windows, marble floors, and carved stone columns, he designs his services for free. Deals were often signed while dining at his restaurant, seated on plush upholstered benches under crystal chandeliers salvaged from Brussels hotels. The fine dining room was accessed from behind mirrored double oak doors that could only be opened by the bartender using a hidden switch. It was an architectural theater designed to seduce. One person who visited in 1968 said he was overwhelmed by the feeling of being “chosen.” Furthermore, they added: “Every time we visited, we always felt very special. We got to park our Lada there, surrounded by Jaguars and other luxury cars. We loved this place and the Raymakers themselves. It created a mystique and made you feel like someone else. It was very psychological.”
Mostly self-taught, Raymakers distanced himself from the architectural world, which regarded him as akin to an uneducated and cunning antiques dealer who builds bland houses just to sell his wares. I looked at him with suspicion. Born in Heverlee, Leuven in 1933, Reimakers enrolled for a degree in architecture at the Sint Lucas school in Skaarbeek, Brussels, but could not stand the Roman Catholic monk-dominated education and left 1. I dropped out at the age of 2. He worked as a draftsman at an electrical substation and spent his nights designing houses. But he soon became disillusioned with Limburg’s rural countryside, its car-centric suburbs filled with ribbon developments and drab villas.
An encounter with a demolition contractor while procuring attic stairs in the 1950s sparked his interest in using salvage as a foil to the mass-produced elements commonly found in modern architecture. He believed that this was the cause of the “impoverishment of architecture.” ” Although he continued to study visual arts and became a secondary school art teacher, he spent all his free time sketching elaborate house designs, scouring local demolition sites, and building connections in the salvage trade. I spent my time building it.
As the 1958 Brussels World Exhibition triggered a wave of demolition and modernization across Belgium, sources of materials became increasingly plentiful. On the other hand, government incentives for people to build their own homes have created many customers looking for something a little different.
The Raymakers’ early projects have the characteristics of a 1960s suburban villa, but with unexpected additions. Boulders brought from the Meuse River were used to form strong walls and chimneys. His friend, the blacksmith Rav Bergens, stamped decorative patterns onto metal plates salvaged from shipyards and turned them into monumental garage doors. As time went on, his work became more vibrant with richer booty and wealthier clients.
Designed in 1970 with Joss Witters, the Kelchtermans House utilizes 10-metre-long reclaimed oak beams to form a pyramidal complex that protects the house, doctor’s surgery, and garage. It’s a masterpiece. And who else but Raymakers would look at the cockpits of his 23 fighter jets lying abandoned in a salvage yard across Flanders and think of turning them into the coolest skylights around?
The Boncher house was built between 1978 and 1984, using a combination of materials from the slaughterhouse in Tienen and the military headquarters in Verviers. Its triumphal arch framed the entrance to a suburban villa in a striking surrealist montage. Awkward junctures where reused elements don’t exactly match were celebrated rather than hidden. The staircase connecting the bedroom and the study was too short, so Raymakers designed it as a feature by designing a large protrusion of brick as a missing step, surrounded by a star-shaped colored marble.
At Rubens Exclussief, a love hotel built in the Brabant countryside in 1979, he created a ripe confection of stucco moldings, stained glass, padded chairs, and mirrors that evoked prostitute chic. I pursued it thoroughly. Church confession booths had a nifty secret escape route in case unwanted visitors showed up unannounced.
Through witty reinvention and radical juxtaposition, the work avoided sentimentality, nostalgia, or pastiche. “I feel like I’ve become a modernist,” Raymakers said in 1991. “We gave new uses to old materials.”
In the epilogue, the authors consider what lessons his curious approach offers for today’s efforts toward circular construction (reusing, renovating, and upcycling) and reducing carbon in our bodies. There is. The days of such rich and dignified salvage are long gone, and historic buildings that were briefly bulldozed in the 1960s are now thankfully preserved. Cost is also a barrier, as carefully demolishing a building requires extra labor compared to grinding it into aggregate. But if, as Lothar argues, the prices of new materials had to reflect their impacts on the environment, the labor market, and society as a whole, used materials would immediately become more competitive.
They challenge architects and builders to take a slower, more collaborative approach to on-site improvisation, and to value used components and their patina (if not his tax issues). He urges us to learn from the Raymakers’ attitude. If we want a circular building economy to flourish, we must go beyond technocratic solutions and adopt culturally and aesthetically meaningful practices, turning used elements into new configurations with noisy flair and unbridled joy. They argue that we must learn the skills of the Raymakers to relocate. If sustainable design can be so much fun, what’s stopping you from having it?