The Architectural Review

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2025-05-15 13:45:35 ·

Marcel Raymaekers (1933–)

Part antiques dealer, part architect, this Belgian maverick is an unlikely source of lessons for contemporary material reuse
Marcel Raymaekersnever qualified as an architect. This did not stop him from procuring the materials for, designing and building around 150 villas across Belgium. The exact number is unknown: Belgium’s architectural establishment mostly ignored and rejected Raymaekers just as he ignored and rejected them, and as a result his work has never been collated or taken seriously. Raymaekers himself never kept records of his work; he regarded the drawing board as a ‘torture device’, preferring sketches and improvisation on site, determined by the material batches he had to hand. The extent of Raymaekers’ oeuvre is also hard to fathom because he wanted to keep it under the radar of the tax authorities.
They caught up with him eventually; he was bankrupted in 2014. Today, Raymaekers is a 92‑year‑old tenant living inside what was once his personal empire, Queen of the South, in the Limburg countryside in north‑western Belgium. This compound was – and to a limited extent, still is – a vast salvage yard packed with components scavenged from aggressive postwar demolition. This puzzling place, completed in 1972 but constantly expanded, is stuffed with billowing pitched roofs, impossible archways, numerous appendages and antechambers. In its heyday – the 1970s and ’80s – Queen of the South also had a nightclub, a restaurant, a jazz venue, Raymaekers’ own ultra‑luxe apartment, and an estaminet – a plush, wood‑panelled, banquet‑seated, mirror‑pillared café‑bar.
Marcel Raymaekers was born in 1933 near Leuven in Belgium. In 1950, he enrolled to study architecture at the Sint-Lukas School in Brussels but left a year later without a degree. Though not officially an architect, Raymaekers proceeded to design around 150 projects, from suburban homes to hotels and music venues – in 1986, he completed the Orlando discotheque, which burned down in 2014
Credit: Roger Dyckmans
It was here that Raymaekers would sit – when he was not criss‑crossing Belgium scouting for materials – scoping out clients as they stumbled giddily into his world, overwhelmed by the aspiration and status anxiety that Queen of the South was designed to induce. The project was also a cultural hub attracting misfits and eccentrics, wheelers and dealers, experts and charlatans. The novelist Hugo Claus had his 50th birthday at Queen of the South, honouring Raymaekers in his speech. Raymaekers and his wife Hilde did interviews for newspapers, magazines and TV, often while reclining on their bed. The media was not interested in him as an accomplished architect, but as a purveyor of kitsch, an absurdity.
What Raymaekers had to sell his clients was more than simply antiques or even houses composed of them. What Raymaekers was really selling were dreams of nobility: the life of a lord and lady of the manor, set apartfrom an increasingly modernised, homogenised world. Sensuality and hedonism, expressed through haptic, resplendent materials, was a big part of the allure too – the promise of a new way of life. One of Raymaekers’ bigger projects was a love hotel, Rubensexclusief, near Diest, completed in 1979. Each chamber was bestowed with an excess of padded velvet upholstery, often creeping up the walls and curving onto the ceilings. In the lobby, a salvaged confession booth was intended as a hiding place for guilty parties. Raymaekers brought several clients here to celebrate a successful transaction or to introduce them to his material language before starting design negotiations.
His clients were middle‑class professionals – teachers, dentists, entrepreneurs, doctors, engineers, florists, pharmacists. Wealthy, but not extraordinarily rich. Many of his houses allowed them to live and work – interfacing with the public – on the same property. House Kelchtermans from 1970, for example, designed with architect Jos Witters, is composed of three pyramids – a home, a doctor’s office and a garage – structured with reclaimed oak beams. The roof tiles were salvaged by the client himself, Dr Kelchtermans, who received tips on where to find them from his patients, many of whom were farmers whose buildings were undergoing modernisation or demolition. Inside, it is all split‑levels, enormous fireplaces and complex, spiralling spaces. But the house’s biggest flourish is the skylights: 23 cupolas from decommissioned Lockheed T‑33 fighter jet cockpits. Raymaekers had found them languishing in a salvage yard on the other side of Flanders, saw their architectural potential and persuaded the client to buy them.
Client participation was everything. The Boncher family’s house, completed in 1984, is a mash‑up of components from a derelict slaughterhouse in the city of Tienen and an army barracks in Verviers. The Bonchers themselves spent weeks carefully dismantling the bricks, Gobertange white stone and fleur‑de‑lis roof tiles from the slaughterhouse. Raymaekers had the grand entrance and guardhouses from the barracks available in his stock at Queen of the South, probably at a time‑sensitive discount.
Many of the construction and final design decisions for House Boncher were left to happenstance; as the contractors built the walls up row‑by‑row, whenever a hole was needed for a window, Raymaekers would decide the dimensions only at that moment, based on whatever blue limestone window frame he happened to have in stock. Occasionally, the masons had to deconstruct part of a wall if a larger‑than‑anticipated window became available.
‘Raymaekers’ houses are intelligent, instinctive assemblages of unpredictable material streams’
The interior, too, required improvisation. A white stone staircase, salvaged from a church pulpit, was meant to spiral up to the main bedroom of House Boncher but turned out to be about 200mm too short. The solution? Raymaekers and the contractors decided to build a hefty bump into the floor, consisting of cobbles and decorative tiling. It gave the staircase the necessary boost to reach up to the bedroom. It was typical of how designing exclusively with old materials required Raymaekers to empower and trust his contractors. Their design contributions, extemporisation and management of materials and how they might fit together were intrinsic to the realisation of every project.
Working with large batches helped simplify matters – or allowed further complexity. When the Antwerp townhouse of art nouveau architect Joseph Bascourt was demolished to make way for the extension of a car park, Raymaekers snapped up the facade. Without knowing or caring how the pieces were originally composed, Raymaekers shuffled them into a new configuration for the facade of a flower shop a client had commissioned in the Brussels hinterland, completed in 1987. Raymaekers moved Bascourt’s decorative entablature from the top of the facade down to eye level, the better to be enjoyed; that this meant the windows on the top floor would now poke strangely above the roofline was fine with both Raymaekers and the client.
The shreds of Raymaekers’ reputation that survive today, and what can be retrieved and reconstructed of his private and professional habits, are complex at best. His charisma and determination enabled him to convince artisans, contractors, labourers and clients to stretch themselves beyond what they thought possible, adding their own talent to his difficult buildings. But Raymaekers could also be intimidating and domineering. Collaborators often stepped away from his all‑consuming process; clients who considered him too pushy and found themselves running out of money could cease working with him. But this was not the case for his spouses, sons, grandchildren and daughters‑in‑law. They were bound to him by more than his business practice and art, and some of them suffered enduring and even unbearable distress. Their suffering is the shadow behind Raymaekers’ work.
When researchers from Belgian design practice Rotor and the University of Ghent – also the authors of this article – started showing up at Queen of the South in 2011, it was not because of Raymaekers’ reputation; it was merely to include Queen of the South on Opalis’s database, a roster of salvage dealers covering much of north‑western Europe. We only realised the extent and importance of his work after several years and at least three visits. Raymaekers had refused all interviews since his bankruptcy, but after some persuasion, a meeting was scheduled in the courtyard on a grey winter day. Triggered by newspaper cuttings, his own limited archive of photographs and strolls through the stock, a picture emerged of the rich reuse ecosystem in which he was active in his glory days. It is this ecosystem, along with the remarkable and necessary fluidity of Raymaekers’ practice with old building materials, that was critical to his success. Belgium was blessed in the postwar period with a remarkably robust network of demolition contractors who were also salvage dealers, antiques dealers who were also designers, industrial scrapyards willing to let architects pick through their mountains of waste. The landscape was ripe for reuse. So was the legislative field.
Raymaekers’ oeuvre could be mistaken, at a cursory glance, for just more Ugly Belgian Houses. His houses appear to be kitsch, chaotic, brazen, overstuffed with mixed metaphors. But they are much more than that. They are intelligent, instinctive assemblages of unpredictable material streams. They are bracing, never boring. And though they are wildly out‑of‑step with today’s tastes, the houses – and moreover, the kind of innovative practice that built them – have a lot to teach spatial practitioners about reusing architectural materials and circularity in the construction industry.
And as with any of those so‑called ‘ugly’ Belgian houses, the label is a trivialisationof something systemic and generative. What makes possible such expressionistic and characterful suburban houses in Belgium – whatever one thinks of their quality – is government policy since the postwar era. While other European countries went all in on standardised social housing, in Belgium, the 1948 De Taeye Law offered construction grants and a state guarantee on mortgages, triggering families to initiate, help design and sometimes even execute the construction of their own homes, tapping into a rural tradition of self‑reliance.
Raymaekers worked at a time when modernisation – and the demolition it demanded – was churning out a constant flow of antique materials. It was also a time when the merger and exchange of roles in the architectural process – from material procurement, to design and collaboration live on site – was still possible. Material reuse today is much harder. It must work precisely against the linear flows of extraction, capital, efficiency and predictability – all supercharged by the digital and its requirement of an almost omniscient predictability, and by increasingly demanding rules around compliance and liability. But to explore the wild potential of material reuse – not just to reduce embodied carbon, but to unleash new design potential and a richer culture around materialand practice – it must be possible to imagine ways in which material procurement, construction sites and the architects’ role can change fundamentally again.

Illustration: Laslo Antal for The Architectural Review. about the process of making this portrait here

2025-05-15
Justinien Tribillon

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AR May 2025CircularityBuy Now
#marcel #raymaekers

Marcel Raymaekers (1933–)

Part antiques dealer, part architect, this Belgian maverick is an unlikely source of lessons for contemporary material reuse Marcel Raymaekersnever qualified as an architect. This did not stop him from procuring the materials for, designing and building around 150 villas across Belgium. The exact number is unknown: Belgium’s architectural establishment mostly ignored and rejected Raymaekers just as he ignored and rejected them, and as a result his work has never been collated or taken seriously. Raymaekers himself never kept records of his work; he regarded the drawing board as a ‘torture device’, preferring sketches and improvisation on site, determined by the material batches he had to hand. The extent of Raymaekers’ oeuvre is also hard to fathom because he wanted to keep it under the radar of the tax authorities. They caught up with him eventually; he was bankrupted in 2014. Today, Raymaekers is a 92‑year‑old tenant living inside what was once his personal empire, Queen of the South, in the Limburg countryside in north‑western Belgium. This compound was – and to a limited extent, still is – a vast salvage yard packed with components scavenged from aggressive postwar demolition. This puzzling place, completed in 1972 but constantly expanded, is stuffed with billowing pitched roofs, impossible archways, numerous appendages and antechambers. In its heyday – the 1970s and ’80s – Queen of the South also had a nightclub, a restaurant, a jazz venue, Raymaekers’ own ultra‑luxe apartment, and an estaminet – a plush, wood‑panelled, banquet‑seated, mirror‑pillared café‑bar. Marcel Raymaekers was born in 1933 near Leuven in Belgium. In 1950, he enrolled to study architecture at the Sint-Lukas School in Brussels but left a year later without a degree. Though not officially an architect, Raymaekers proceeded to design around 150 projects, from suburban homes to hotels and music venues – in 1986, he completed the Orlando discotheque, which burned down in 2014 Credit: Roger Dyckmans It was here that Raymaekers would sit – when he was not criss‑crossing Belgium scouting for materials – scoping out clients as they stumbled giddily into his world, overwhelmed by the aspiration and status anxiety that Queen of the South was designed to induce. The project was also a cultural hub attracting misfits and eccentrics, wheelers and dealers, experts and charlatans. The novelist Hugo Claus had his 50th birthday at Queen of the South, honouring Raymaekers in his speech. Raymaekers and his wife Hilde did interviews for newspapers, magazines and TV, often while reclining on their bed. The media was not interested in him as an accomplished architect, but as a purveyor of kitsch, an absurdity. What Raymaekers had to sell his clients was more than simply antiques or even houses composed of them. What Raymaekers was really selling were dreams of nobility: the life of a lord and lady of the manor, set apartfrom an increasingly modernised, homogenised world. Sensuality and hedonism, expressed through haptic, resplendent materials, was a big part of the allure too – the promise of a new way of life. One of Raymaekers’ bigger projects was a love hotel, Rubensexclusief, near Diest, completed in 1979. Each chamber was bestowed with an excess of padded velvet upholstery, often creeping up the walls and curving onto the ceilings. In the lobby, a salvaged confession booth was intended as a hiding place for guilty parties. Raymaekers brought several clients here to celebrate a successful transaction or to introduce them to his material language before starting design negotiations. His clients were middle‑class professionals – teachers, dentists, entrepreneurs, doctors, engineers, florists, pharmacists. Wealthy, but not extraordinarily rich. Many of his houses allowed them to live and work – interfacing with the public – on the same property. House Kelchtermans from 1970, for example, designed with architect Jos Witters, is composed of three pyramids – a home, a doctor’s office and a garage – structured with reclaimed oak beams. The roof tiles were salvaged by the client himself, Dr Kelchtermans, who received tips on where to find them from his patients, many of whom were farmers whose buildings were undergoing modernisation or demolition. Inside, it is all split‑levels, enormous fireplaces and complex, spiralling spaces. But the house’s biggest flourish is the skylights: 23 cupolas from decommissioned Lockheed T‑33 fighter jet cockpits. Raymaekers had found them languishing in a salvage yard on the other side of Flanders, saw their architectural potential and persuaded the client to buy them. Client participation was everything. The Boncher family’s house, completed in 1984, is a mash‑up of components from a derelict slaughterhouse in the city of Tienen and an army barracks in Verviers. The Bonchers themselves spent weeks carefully dismantling the bricks, Gobertange white stone and fleur‑de‑lis roof tiles from the slaughterhouse. Raymaekers had the grand entrance and guardhouses from the barracks available in his stock at Queen of the South, probably at a time‑sensitive discount. Many of the construction and final design decisions for House Boncher were left to happenstance; as the contractors built the walls up row‑by‑row, whenever a hole was needed for a window, Raymaekers would decide the dimensions only at that moment, based on whatever blue limestone window frame he happened to have in stock. Occasionally, the masons had to deconstruct part of a wall if a larger‑than‑anticipated window became available. ‘Raymaekers’ houses are intelligent, instinctive assemblages of unpredictable material streams’ The interior, too, required improvisation. A white stone staircase, salvaged from a church pulpit, was meant to spiral up to the main bedroom of House Boncher but turned out to be about 200mm too short. The solution? Raymaekers and the contractors decided to build a hefty bump into the floor, consisting of cobbles and decorative tiling. It gave the staircase the necessary boost to reach up to the bedroom. It was typical of how designing exclusively with old materials required Raymaekers to empower and trust his contractors. Their design contributions, extemporisation and management of materials and how they might fit together were intrinsic to the realisation of every project. Working with large batches helped simplify matters – or allowed further complexity. When the Antwerp townhouse of art nouveau architect Joseph Bascourt was demolished to make way for the extension of a car park, Raymaekers snapped up the facade. Without knowing or caring how the pieces were originally composed, Raymaekers shuffled them into a new configuration for the facade of a flower shop a client had commissioned in the Brussels hinterland, completed in 1987. Raymaekers moved Bascourt’s decorative entablature from the top of the facade down to eye level, the better to be enjoyed; that this meant the windows on the top floor would now poke strangely above the roofline was fine with both Raymaekers and the client. The shreds of Raymaekers’ reputation that survive today, and what can be retrieved and reconstructed of his private and professional habits, are complex at best. His charisma and determination enabled him to convince artisans, contractors, labourers and clients to stretch themselves beyond what they thought possible, adding their own talent to his difficult buildings. But Raymaekers could also be intimidating and domineering. Collaborators often stepped away from his all‑consuming process; clients who considered him too pushy and found themselves running out of money could cease working with him. But this was not the case for his spouses, sons, grandchildren and daughters‑in‑law. They were bound to him by more than his business practice and art, and some of them suffered enduring and even unbearable distress. Their suffering is the shadow behind Raymaekers’ work. When researchers from Belgian design practice Rotor and the University of Ghent – also the authors of this article – started showing up at Queen of the South in 2011, it was not because of Raymaekers’ reputation; it was merely to include Queen of the South on Opalis’s database, a roster of salvage dealers covering much of north‑western Europe. We only realised the extent and importance of his work after several years and at least three visits. Raymaekers had refused all interviews since his bankruptcy, but after some persuasion, a meeting was scheduled in the courtyard on a grey winter day. Triggered by newspaper cuttings, his own limited archive of photographs and strolls through the stock, a picture emerged of the rich reuse ecosystem in which he was active in his glory days. It is this ecosystem, along with the remarkable and necessary fluidity of Raymaekers’ practice with old building materials, that was critical to his success. Belgium was blessed in the postwar period with a remarkably robust network of demolition contractors who were also salvage dealers, antiques dealers who were also designers, industrial scrapyards willing to let architects pick through their mountains of waste. The landscape was ripe for reuse. So was the legislative field. Raymaekers’ oeuvre could be mistaken, at a cursory glance, for just more Ugly Belgian Houses. His houses appear to be kitsch, chaotic, brazen, overstuffed with mixed metaphors. But they are much more than that. They are intelligent, instinctive assemblages of unpredictable material streams. They are bracing, never boring. And though they are wildly out‑of‑step with today’s tastes, the houses – and moreover, the kind of innovative practice that built them – have a lot to teach spatial practitioners about reusing architectural materials and circularity in the construction industry. And as with any of those so‑called ‘ugly’ Belgian houses, the label is a trivialisationof something systemic and generative. What makes possible such expressionistic and characterful suburban houses in Belgium – whatever one thinks of their quality – is government policy since the postwar era. While other European countries went all in on standardised social housing, in Belgium, the 1948 De Taeye Law offered construction grants and a state guarantee on mortgages, triggering families to initiate, help design and sometimes even execute the construction of their own homes, tapping into a rural tradition of self‑reliance. Raymaekers worked at a time when modernisation – and the demolition it demanded – was churning out a constant flow of antique materials. It was also a time when the merger and exchange of roles in the architectural process – from material procurement, to design and collaboration live on site – was still possible. Material reuse today is much harder. It must work precisely against the linear flows of extraction, capital, efficiency and predictability – all supercharged by the digital and its requirement of an almost omniscient predictability, and by increasingly demanding rules around compliance and liability. But to explore the wild potential of material reuse – not just to reduce embodied carbon, but to unleash new design potential and a richer culture around materialand practice – it must be possible to imagine ways in which material procurement, construction sites and the architects’ role can change fundamentally again. Illustration: Laslo Antal for The Architectural Review. about the process of making this portrait here 2025-05-15 Justinien Tribillon Share AR May 2025CircularityBuy Now #marcel #raymaekers

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Marcel Raymaekers (1933–)

Part antiques dealer, part architect, this Belgian maverick is an unlikely source of lessons for contemporary material reuse Marcel Raymaekers (1933–) never qualified as an architect. This did not stop him from procuring the materials for, designing and building around 150 villas across Belgium. The exact number is unknown: Belgium’s architectural establishment mostly ignored and rejected Raymaekers just as he ignored and rejected them, and as a result his work has never been collated or taken seriously. Raymaekers himself never kept records of his work; he regarded the drawing board as a ‘torture device’, preferring sketches and improvisation on site, determined by the material batches he had to hand. The extent of Raymaekers’ oeuvre is also hard to fathom because he wanted to keep it under the radar of the tax authorities. They caught up with him eventually; he was bankrupted in 2014. Today, Raymaekers is a 92‑year‑old tenant living inside what was once his personal empire, Queen of the South, in the Limburg countryside in north‑western Belgium. This compound was – and to a limited extent, still is – a vast salvage yard packed with components scavenged from aggressive postwar demolition. This puzzling place, completed in 1972 but constantly expanded, is stuffed with billowing pitched roofs, impossible archways, numerous appendages and antechambers. In its heyday – the 1970s and ’80s – Queen of the South also had a nightclub, a restaurant, a jazz venue, Raymaekers’ own ultra‑luxe apartment, and an estaminet – a plush, wood‑panelled, banquet‑seated, mirror‑pillared café‑bar. Marcel Raymaekers was born in 1933 near Leuven in Belgium. In 1950, he enrolled to study architecture at the Sint-Lukas School in Brussels but left a year later without a degree. Though not officially an architect, Raymaekers proceeded to design around 150 projects, from suburban homes to hotels and music venues – in 1986, he completed the Orlando discotheque, which burned down in 2014 Credit: Roger Dyckmans It was here that Raymaekers would sit – when he was not criss‑crossing Belgium scouting for materials – scoping out clients as they stumbled giddily into his world, overwhelmed by the aspiration and status anxiety that Queen of the South was designed to induce. The project was also a cultural hub attracting misfits and eccentrics, wheelers and dealers, experts and charlatans. The novelist Hugo Claus had his 50th birthday at Queen of the South, honouring Raymaekers in his speech. Raymaekers and his wife Hilde did interviews for newspapers, magazines and TV, often while reclining on their bed. The media was not interested in him as an accomplished architect, but as a purveyor of kitsch, an absurdity. What Raymaekers had to sell his clients was more than simply antiques or even houses composed of them (buy enough materials and he would design you a house for no charge: that was always the deal). What Raymaekers was really selling were dreams of nobility: the life of a lord and lady of the manor, set apart (and above) from an increasingly modernised, homogenised world. Sensuality and hedonism, expressed through haptic, resplendent materials, was a big part of the allure too – the promise of a new way of life. One of Raymaekers’ bigger projects was a love hotel, Rubensexclusief, near Diest, completed in 1979. Each chamber was bestowed with an excess of padded velvet upholstery, often creeping up the walls and curving onto the ceilings. In the lobby, a salvaged confession booth was intended as a hiding place for guilty parties. Raymaekers brought several clients here to celebrate a successful transaction or to introduce them to his material language before starting design negotiations. His clients were middle‑class professionals – teachers, dentists, entrepreneurs, doctors, engineers, florists, pharmacists. Wealthy, but not extraordinarily rich. Many of his houses allowed them to live and work – interfacing with the public – on the same property. House Kelchtermans from 1970, for example, designed with architect Jos Witters, is composed of three pyramids – a home, a doctor’s office and a garage – structured with reclaimed oak beams. The roof tiles were salvaged by the client himself, Dr Kelchtermans, who received tips on where to find them from his patients, many of whom were farmers whose buildings were undergoing modernisation or demolition. Inside, it is all split‑levels, enormous fireplaces and complex, spiralling spaces. But the house’s biggest flourish is the skylights: 23 cupolas from decommissioned Lockheed T‑33 fighter jet cockpits. Raymaekers had found them languishing in a salvage yard on the other side of Flanders, saw their architectural potential and persuaded the client to buy them. Client participation was everything. The Boncher family’s house, completed in 1984, is a mash‑up of components from a derelict slaughterhouse in the city of Tienen and an army barracks in Verviers. The Bonchers themselves spent weeks carefully dismantling the bricks, Gobertange white stone and fleur‑de‑lis roof tiles from the slaughterhouse. Raymaekers had the grand entrance and guardhouses from the barracks available in his stock at Queen of the South, probably at a time‑sensitive discount. Many of the construction and final design decisions for House Boncher were left to happenstance; as the contractors built the walls up row‑by‑row, whenever a hole was needed for a window, Raymaekers would decide the dimensions only at that moment, based on whatever blue limestone window frame he happened to have in stock. Occasionally, the masons had to deconstruct part of a wall if a larger‑than‑anticipated window became available. ‘Raymaekers’ houses are intelligent, instinctive assemblages of unpredictable material streams’ The interior, too, required improvisation. A white stone staircase, salvaged from a church pulpit, was meant to spiral up to the main bedroom of House Boncher but turned out to be about 200mm too short. The solution? Raymaekers and the contractors decided to build a hefty bump into the floor, consisting of cobbles and decorative tiling. It gave the staircase the necessary boost to reach up to the bedroom. It was typical of how designing exclusively with old materials required Raymaekers to empower and trust his contractors. Their design contributions, extemporisation and management of materials and how they might fit together were intrinsic to the realisation of every project. Working with large batches helped simplify matters – or allowed further complexity. When the Antwerp townhouse of art nouveau architect Joseph Bascourt was demolished to make way for the extension of a car park, Raymaekers snapped up the facade. Without knowing or caring how the pieces were originally composed, Raymaekers shuffled them into a new configuration for the facade of a flower shop a client had commissioned in the Brussels hinterland, completed in 1987. Raymaekers moved Bascourt’s decorative entablature from the top of the facade down to eye level, the better to be enjoyed; that this meant the windows on the top floor would now poke strangely above the roofline was fine with both Raymaekers and the client. The shreds of Raymaekers’ reputation that survive today, and what can be retrieved and reconstructed of his private and professional habits, are complex at best. His charisma and determination enabled him to convince artisans, contractors, labourers and clients to stretch themselves beyond what they thought possible, adding their own talent to his difficult buildings. But Raymaekers could also be intimidating and domineering. Collaborators often stepped away from his all‑consuming process; clients who considered him too pushy and found themselves running out of money could cease working with him. But this was not the case for his spouses, sons, grandchildren and daughters‑in‑law. They were bound to him by more than his business practice and art, and some of them suffered enduring and even unbearable distress. Their suffering is the shadow behind Raymaekers’ work. When researchers from Belgian design practice Rotor and the University of Ghent – also the authors of this article – started showing up at Queen of the South in 2011, it was not because of Raymaekers’ reputation; it was merely to include Queen of the South on Opalis’s database, a roster of salvage dealers covering much of north‑western Europe. We only realised the extent and importance of his work after several years and at least three visits. Raymaekers had refused all interviews since his bankruptcy, but after some persuasion, a meeting was scheduled in the courtyard on a grey winter day. Triggered by newspaper cuttings, his own limited archive of photographs and strolls through the stock, a picture emerged of the rich reuse ecosystem in which he was active in his glory days. It is this ecosystem, along with the remarkable and necessary fluidity of Raymaekers’ practice with old building materials, that was critical to his success. Belgium was blessed in the postwar period with a remarkably robust network of demolition contractors who were also salvage dealers, antiques dealers who were also designers, industrial scrapyards willing to let architects pick through their mountains of waste. The landscape was ripe for reuse. So was the legislative field. Raymaekers’ oeuvre could be mistaken, at a cursory glance, for just more Ugly Belgian Houses (several of them have indeed appeared on Hannes Coudenys’ infamous blog). His houses appear to be kitsch, chaotic, brazen, overstuffed with mixed metaphors. But they are much more than that. They are intelligent, instinctive assemblages of unpredictable material streams. They are bracing, never boring. And though they are wildly out‑of‑step with today’s tastes, the houses – and moreover, the kind of innovative practice that built them – have a lot to teach spatial practitioners about reusing architectural materials and circularity in the construction industry. And as with any of those so‑called ‘ugly’ Belgian houses, the label is a trivialisation (and an elitist one) of something systemic and generative. What makes possible such expressionistic and characterful suburban houses in Belgium – whatever one thinks of their quality – is government policy since the postwar era. While other European countries went all in on standardised social housing, in Belgium, the 1948 De Taeye Law offered construction grants and a state guarantee on mortgages, triggering families to initiate, help design and sometimes even execute the construction of their own homes, tapping into a rural tradition of self‑reliance. Raymaekers worked at a time when modernisation – and the demolition it demanded – was churning out a constant flow of antique materials. It was also a time when the merger and exchange of roles in the architectural process – from material procurement, to design and collaboration live on site – was still possible. Material reuse today is much harder. It must work precisely against the linear flows of extraction, capital, efficiency and predictability – all supercharged by the digital and its requirement of an almost omniscient predictability, and by increasingly demanding rules around compliance and liability. But to explore the wild potential of material reuse – not just to reduce embodied carbon, but to unleash new design potential and a richer culture around material (heritage) and practice – it must be possible to imagine ways in which material procurement, construction sites and the architects’ role can change fundamentally again. Illustration: Laslo Antal for The Architectural Review. Read more about the process of making this portrait here 2025-05-15 Justinien Tribillon Share AR May 2025CircularityBuy Now

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2025-05-14 10:49:23 ·

Outside the box: Waldorf school campus in Nairobi, Kenya, by Urko Sánchez Architects

Recycled and reused construction materials turn Urko Sánchez Architects’ Waldorf campus in Nairobi into a teaching aid
When designers at Urko Sánchez Architects received a commission to design a campus in Nairobi’s leafy Karen neighbourhood, the brief from the client, the Nairobi Waldorf School Trust, was direct and concise: design a school deep in the woods without harming the trees, while preserving the old, British colonial‑style structures that would house some classes and other amenities.
The school’s lease on Miotoni Road, also in Karen, had run out and it had acquired a new 10‑year lease from a local landowner to gently develop a woodland site just south of its old premises.
The old school buildings were to be demolished.
The brief also stipulated that the architects use little to no concrete, avoid steel and masonry, and utilise other reversible building techniques that would allow the landowner to return the plot to its natural state once the school’s temporary lease elapsed.
The budget was modest, at around US$250/m².
Karen, a low‑density Nairobi suburb and once part of the coffee estate run by Danish author Karen Blixen in the 1910s and ’20s, is among the few areas in the city that have withstood the pressures of modern development.
Here, buildings still mingle with indigenous trees.
‘The founders of Waldorf School were inclined towards a piece of property that brought nature to the students,’ says James Kioko, the school’s director.
‘We made it clear to the architects that we did not intend to interfere with the natural vegetation.
We asked them, “what if you looked for a design that went around the trees?” They did.’
The result is a campus – one of two run by the Nairobi Waldorf School Trust in the city – spread across 20 rondavel‑style classrooms dotted around the lush groves.
Patterned after local Maasai homesteads, they blend seamlessly into the forest, each a tranquil haven for young minds to grow within.
As the 380 students – from kindergarten to Year 12 – sit down to learn, birdsong fills the air, and an occasional rustling of leaves and the rhythmic sound of raindrops tapping on the translucent rooftops add to the soothing white noise.
Winding pathways lined with flowers connect the learning spaces, with every step being an adventure in nature.
The site is a celebration of sustainable coexistence with nature.
‘Some saw a challenge but we saw an opportunity,’ says Jaime Velasco, Urko Sánchez’s country director for Kenya and lead architect on the Waldorf school project. ‘In order to embed the classrooms in the forest, we needed to know what kind of trees grew where.
What was the root system like? How much empty space was available for the desired building footprint?’
Numerous concepts were presented to the primary stakeholders, including the school board, management and parents.
The administration also carried out a survey among the pupils as to the kind of school environment they would look forward to attending every day.
‘We engaged the older pupils logically while younger ones were given papers to sketch the look and feel of their new school,’ says Patrick Karanja, the pedagogical team chair in charge of academics and students’ welfare.
And draw they did – from elaborate football pitches to swimming pools.
The main takeaway, however, was that the pupils did not want traditional box classrooms, but more playful structures made from natural materials.
‘Visitors usually confuse the design of the classrooms for a luxury tourist campsite and ask, “where’s the school?”’
‘We sketched on forest clearings then did a prototype, a mock‑up classroom which we brought to the planning meetings,’ says Velasco.
‘One area had a sizeable clearing and we knew right away that this was going to be the kindergarten, where small children could play with proper supervision.’
Taking the theme of the traditional courtyard, or boma, the classes began to ‘grow’ among the trees.
Treated timber offcuts, salvaged from local suppliers as well as the old Miotoni Road school buildings, line the bottom quarter of each classroom’s facade, giving the impression of a structure fully grounded in the soil.
The space between the double polycarbonate walls is filled with leftover soil excavated from the site and compost to create a ‘living wall’ where bugs and worms can find a home.
Polycarbonate roofing invites the daylight in, and reduces the need for artificial lighting.
In addition, several materials from dismantled classrooms from the previous school grounds were recycled to reduce waste, save on funds and add to the school’s sustainability lessons.
For example, wooden floors and walls were repurposed as parapets, and old roofing tiles converted to path boundaries.
To reduce congestion in the toilets, oil drums purchased at a local second‑hand market were strategically placed on the compound to serve as washing sinks while a shipping container from the old school currently serves as the library.
Although a few trees had to give way for the playground, the logs were used to create the ‘forest’ screen of the multipurpose hall.
The school is representative of the broader work of Urko Sánchez, the Spanish founder of the eponymous architectural firm. Over the past decades, Sánchez has undertaken several projects on the African continent.
Upon graduating in 1998, he volunteered on the first of these along the volatile Kenya‑Somalia border, before falling in love with Lamu Island on Kenya’s north‑eastern coast, one of the oldest civilisations in East Africa and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Sánchez’s first major project in Kenya was Lamu House, a boutique hotel in Lamu’s Old Town that encapsulates the peaceful and friendly nature of the Swahili coastline.
Through his Mombasa office, Sánchez worked on other projects along the coast whose development is deeply rooted in local history and culture.
His techniques tell the stories of Africa’s diverse communities, each structure a narrative of identity and resilience.
He found joy in the intricate thatched roofs visible in almost every village on the continent, the vibrancy of whitewashed earthen walls, and the seamless integration of buildings into their natural surroundings.
At the award‑winning Red Pepper House, another small private house in Lamu with a thatched roof, Sánchez had to balance local tradition with modern conveniences while taking care not to destroy the surrounding mangrove forest.
Some of these techniques would go on to be replicated in the Nairobi school project.
‘Every project is unique,’ says Velasco, his rubber boots sloshing over wet leaves outside the kindergarten.
‘We are famous for Swahili architecture because our founder started the work in Lamu and the local context drew us to do that.
In Nairobi, we were also faced with environmental issues and that is why the school came out like this.’
‘The school has triggered serious conversations among the students on the need to protect Kenya’s environment’
The very design of the school is a source of pride not only to the learners but the local community too.
Karanja tells the story of a child who brought his friends to the kindergarten classroom ‘just to see the tree popping out of the roof’ – an example of the very interaction with nature that the school was hoping for.
‘Visitors usually confuse the design of the classrooms for a luxury tourist campsite and ask, “where’s the school?”’
It has also triggered serious conversations among the students on the need to protect Kenya’s environment.
While hiking local nature trails, they have seen firsthand the country’s dwindling forest cover.
‘They see the diminishing snow on Mount Kenya, the country’s highest peak, as a result of climate change,’ says Karanja.
‘Then they look at their school and understand why we need the trees.
More trees mean more rain; more rain results in more snow cover.’
Kioko, the school director, reckons the school’s design does much more than just create a conducive learning environment – it lays the groundwork for nurturing thoughtful, adaptable and globally conscious students that are in tune with the Waldorf style of education.
According to the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America, education ‘should address the whole child – their physical wellbeing, their social and emotional wellbeing, and their intellectual, cognitive and spiritual development’, with children being ‘encouraged to engage in imaginative play, hands‑on work, and outdoor and artistic activities’.
Since the founding of the first Waldorf school in 1919, this pedagogical philosophy has taken original and often pioneering architectural forms around the world, with natural materials – especially wood – being preferred for early childhood settings.
The school’s eco‑friendly elements, Kioko says, serve as live learning tools that encourage students to explore real‑world applications of science and technology.
‘If you look at the national goals of education in Kenya, we are not looking for academics,’ he says.
‘The country aims to bring out a child who will fit in the society.
We need thinkers outside the box.
We need collaborators.
We need people who can critique things, not people who just recall what they were taught in class but who interact with the ecosystem and try to solve the challenges of the real world.
That is our goal.’
For Urko Sánchez Architects and the Nairobi Waldorf School Trust community, architecture goes beyond creating structures, becoming a tool to foster connection between people, their culture and their land.
At the Karen campus, this was a labour of love for nurturing the future generation and a tribute to the rich architectural heritage of the African continent.

Source: https://www.architectural-review.com/buildings/outside-the-box-waldorf-school-campus-in-nairobi-kenya-by-urko-sanchez-architects" style="color: #0066cc;">https://www.architectural-review.com/buildings/outside-the-box-waldorf-school-campus-in-nairobi-kenya-by-urko-sanchez-architects
#outside #the #box #waldorf #school #campus #nairobi #kenya #urko #sánchez #architects

Outside the box: Waldorf school campus in Nairobi, Kenya, by Urko Sánchez Architects

Recycled and reused construction materials turn Urko Sánchez Architects’ Waldorf campus in Nairobi into a teaching aid When designers at Urko Sánchez Architects received a commission to design a campus in Nairobi’s leafy Karen neighbourhood, the brief from the client, the Nairobi Waldorf School Trust, was direct and concise: design a school deep in the woods without harming the trees, while preserving the old, British colonial‑style structures that would house some classes and other amenities. The school’s lease on Miotoni Road, also in Karen, had run out and it had acquired a new 10‑year lease from a local landowner to gently develop a woodland site just south of its old premises. The old school buildings were to be demolished. The brief also stipulated that the architects use little to no concrete, avoid steel and masonry, and utilise other reversible building techniques that would allow the landowner to return the plot to its natural state once the school’s temporary lease elapsed. The budget was modest, at around US$250/m². Karen, a low‑density Nairobi suburb and once part of the coffee estate run by Danish author Karen Blixen in the 1910s and ’20s, is among the few areas in the city that have withstood the pressures of modern development. Here, buildings still mingle with indigenous trees. ‘The founders of Waldorf School were inclined towards a piece of property that brought nature to the students,’ says James Kioko, the school’s director. ‘We made it clear to the architects that we did not intend to interfere with the natural vegetation. We asked them, “what if you looked for a design that went around the trees?” They did.’ The result is a campus – one of two run by the Nairobi Waldorf School Trust in the city – spread across 20 rondavel‑style classrooms dotted around the lush groves. Patterned after local Maasai homesteads, they blend seamlessly into the forest, each a tranquil haven for young minds to grow within. As the 380 students – from kindergarten to Year 12 – sit down to learn, birdsong fills the air, and an occasional rustling of leaves and the rhythmic sound of raindrops tapping on the translucent rooftops add to the soothing white noise. Winding pathways lined with flowers connect the learning spaces, with every step being an adventure in nature. The site is a celebration of sustainable coexistence with nature. ‘Some saw a challenge but we saw an opportunity,’ says Jaime Velasco, Urko Sánchez’s country director for Kenya and lead architect on the Waldorf school project. ‘In order to embed the classrooms in the forest, we needed to know what kind of trees grew where. What was the root system like? How much empty space was available for the desired building footprint?’ Numerous concepts were presented to the primary stakeholders, including the school board, management and parents. The administration also carried out a survey among the pupils as to the kind of school environment they would look forward to attending every day. ‘We engaged the older pupils logically while younger ones were given papers to sketch the look and feel of their new school,’ says Patrick Karanja, the pedagogical team chair in charge of academics and students’ welfare. And draw they did – from elaborate football pitches to swimming pools. The main takeaway, however, was that the pupils did not want traditional box classrooms, but more playful structures made from natural materials. ‘Visitors usually confuse the design of the classrooms for a luxury tourist campsite and ask, “where’s the school?”’ ‘We sketched on forest clearings then did a prototype, a mock‑up classroom which we brought to the planning meetings,’ says Velasco. ‘One area had a sizeable clearing and we knew right away that this was going to be the kindergarten, where small children could play with proper supervision.’ Taking the theme of the traditional courtyard, or boma, the classes began to ‘grow’ among the trees. Treated timber offcuts, salvaged from local suppliers as well as the old Miotoni Road school buildings, line the bottom quarter of each classroom’s facade, giving the impression of a structure fully grounded in the soil. The space between the double polycarbonate walls is filled with leftover soil excavated from the site and compost to create a ‘living wall’ where bugs and worms can find a home. Polycarbonate roofing invites the daylight in, and reduces the need for artificial lighting. In addition, several materials from dismantled classrooms from the previous school grounds were recycled to reduce waste, save on funds and add to the school’s sustainability lessons. For example, wooden floors and walls were repurposed as parapets, and old roofing tiles converted to path boundaries. To reduce congestion in the toilets, oil drums purchased at a local second‑hand market were strategically placed on the compound to serve as washing sinks while a shipping container from the old school currently serves as the library. Although a few trees had to give way for the playground, the logs were used to create the ‘forest’ screen of the multipurpose hall. The school is representative of the broader work of Urko Sánchez, the Spanish founder of the eponymous architectural firm. Over the past decades, Sánchez has undertaken several projects on the African continent. Upon graduating in 1998, he volunteered on the first of these along the volatile Kenya‑Somalia border, before falling in love with Lamu Island on Kenya’s north‑eastern coast, one of the oldest civilisations in East Africa and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Sánchez’s first major project in Kenya was Lamu House, a boutique hotel in Lamu’s Old Town that encapsulates the peaceful and friendly nature of the Swahili coastline. Through his Mombasa office, Sánchez worked on other projects along the coast whose development is deeply rooted in local history and culture. His techniques tell the stories of Africa’s diverse communities, each structure a narrative of identity and resilience. He found joy in the intricate thatched roofs visible in almost every village on the continent, the vibrancy of whitewashed earthen walls, and the seamless integration of buildings into their natural surroundings. At the award‑winning Red Pepper House, another small private house in Lamu with a thatched roof, Sánchez had to balance local tradition with modern conveniences while taking care not to destroy the surrounding mangrove forest. Some of these techniques would go on to be replicated in the Nairobi school project. ‘Every project is unique,’ says Velasco, his rubber boots sloshing over wet leaves outside the kindergarten. ‘We are famous for Swahili architecture because our founder started the work in Lamu and the local context drew us to do that. In Nairobi, we were also faced with environmental issues and that is why the school came out like this.’ ‘The school has triggered serious conversations among the students on the need to protect Kenya’s environment’ The very design of the school is a source of pride not only to the learners but the local community too. Karanja tells the story of a child who brought his friends to the kindergarten classroom ‘just to see the tree popping out of the roof’ – an example of the very interaction with nature that the school was hoping for. ‘Visitors usually confuse the design of the classrooms for a luxury tourist campsite and ask, “where’s the school?”’ It has also triggered serious conversations among the students on the need to protect Kenya’s environment. While hiking local nature trails, they have seen firsthand the country’s dwindling forest cover. ‘They see the diminishing snow on Mount Kenya, the country’s highest peak, as a result of climate change,’ says Karanja. ‘Then they look at their school and understand why we need the trees. More trees mean more rain; more rain results in more snow cover.’ Kioko, the school director, reckons the school’s design does much more than just create a conducive learning environment – it lays the groundwork for nurturing thoughtful, adaptable and globally conscious students that are in tune with the Waldorf style of education. According to the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America, education ‘should address the whole child – their physical wellbeing, their social and emotional wellbeing, and their intellectual, cognitive and spiritual development’, with children being ‘encouraged to engage in imaginative play, hands‑on work, and outdoor and artistic activities’. Since the founding of the first Waldorf school in 1919, this pedagogical philosophy has taken original and often pioneering architectural forms around the world, with natural materials – especially wood – being preferred for early childhood settings. The school’s eco‑friendly elements, Kioko says, serve as live learning tools that encourage students to explore real‑world applications of science and technology. ‘If you look at the national goals of education in Kenya, we are not looking for academics,’ he says. ‘The country aims to bring out a child who will fit in the society. We need thinkers outside the box. We need collaborators. We need people who can critique things, not people who just recall what they were taught in class but who interact with the ecosystem and try to solve the challenges of the real world. That is our goal.’ For Urko Sánchez Architects and the Nairobi Waldorf School Trust community, architecture goes beyond creating structures, becoming a tool to foster connection between people, their culture and their land. At the Karen campus, this was a labour of love for nurturing the future generation and a tribute to the rich architectural heritage of the African continent. Source: https://www.architectural-review.com/buildings/outside-the-box-waldorf-school-campus-in-nairobi-kenya-by-urko-sanchez-architects #outside #the #box #waldorf #school #campus #nairobi #kenya #urko #sánchez #architects

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Outside the box: Waldorf school campus in Nairobi, Kenya, by Urko Sánchez Architects

Recycled and reused construction materials turn Urko Sánchez Architects’ Waldorf campus in Nairobi into a teaching aid When designers at Urko Sánchez Architects received a commission to design a campus in Nairobi’s leafy Karen neighbourhood, the brief from the client, the Nairobi Waldorf School Trust, was direct and concise: design a school deep in the woods without harming the trees, while preserving the old, British colonial‑style structures that would house some classes and other amenities. The school’s lease on Miotoni Road, also in Karen, had run out and it had acquired a new 10‑year lease from a local landowner to gently develop a woodland site just south of its old premises. The old school buildings were to be demolished. The brief also stipulated that the architects use little to no concrete, avoid steel and masonry, and utilise other reversible building techniques that would allow the landowner to return the plot to its natural state once the school’s temporary lease elapsed. The budget was modest, at around US$250/m². Karen, a low‑density Nairobi suburb and once part of the coffee estate run by Danish author Karen Blixen in the 1910s and ’20s, is among the few areas in the city that have withstood the pressures of modern development. Here, buildings still mingle with indigenous trees. ‘The founders of Waldorf School were inclined towards a piece of property that brought nature to the students,’ says James Kioko, the school’s director. ‘We made it clear to the architects that we did not intend to interfere with the natural vegetation. We asked them, “what if you looked for a design that went around the trees?” They did.’ The result is a campus – one of two run by the Nairobi Waldorf School Trust in the city – spread across 20 rondavel‑style classrooms dotted around the lush groves. Patterned after local Maasai homesteads, they blend seamlessly into the forest, each a tranquil haven for young minds to grow within. As the 380 students – from kindergarten to Year 12 – sit down to learn, birdsong fills the air, and an occasional rustling of leaves and the rhythmic sound of raindrops tapping on the translucent rooftops add to the soothing white noise. Winding pathways lined with flowers connect the learning spaces, with every step being an adventure in nature. The site is a celebration of sustainable coexistence with nature. ‘Some saw a challenge but we saw an opportunity,’ says Jaime Velasco, Urko Sánchez’s country director for Kenya and lead architect on the Waldorf school project. ‘In order to embed the classrooms in the forest, we needed to know what kind of trees grew where. What was the root system like? How much empty space was available for the desired building footprint?’ Numerous concepts were presented to the primary stakeholders, including the school board, management and parents. The administration also carried out a survey among the pupils as to the kind of school environment they would look forward to attending every day. ‘We engaged the older pupils logically while younger ones were given papers to sketch the look and feel of their new school,’ says Patrick Karanja, the pedagogical team chair in charge of academics and students’ welfare. And draw they did – from elaborate football pitches to swimming pools. The main takeaway, however, was that the pupils did not want traditional box classrooms, but more playful structures made from natural materials. ‘Visitors usually confuse the design of the classrooms for a luxury tourist campsite and ask, “where’s the school?”’ ‘We sketched on forest clearings then did a prototype, a mock‑up classroom which we brought to the planning meetings,’ says Velasco. ‘One area had a sizeable clearing and we knew right away that this was going to be the kindergarten, where small children could play with proper supervision.’ Taking the theme of the traditional courtyard, or boma, the classes began to ‘grow’ among the trees. Treated timber offcuts, salvaged from local suppliers as well as the old Miotoni Road school buildings, line the bottom quarter of each classroom’s facade, giving the impression of a structure fully grounded in the soil. The space between the double polycarbonate walls is filled with leftover soil excavated from the site and compost to create a ‘living wall’ where bugs and worms can find a home. Polycarbonate roofing invites the daylight in, and reduces the need for artificial lighting. In addition, several materials from dismantled classrooms from the previous school grounds were recycled to reduce waste, save on funds and add to the school’s sustainability lessons. For example, wooden floors and walls were repurposed as parapets, and old roofing tiles converted to path boundaries. To reduce congestion in the toilets, oil drums purchased at a local second‑hand market were strategically placed on the compound to serve as washing sinks while a shipping container from the old school currently serves as the library. Although a few trees had to give way for the playground, the logs were used to create the ‘forest’ screen of the multipurpose hall. The school is representative of the broader work of Urko Sánchez, the Spanish founder of the eponymous architectural firm. Over the past decades, Sánchez has undertaken several projects on the African continent. Upon graduating in 1998, he volunteered on the first of these along the volatile Kenya‑Somalia border, before falling in love with Lamu Island on Kenya’s north‑eastern coast, one of the oldest civilisations in East Africa and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Sánchez’s first major project in Kenya was Lamu House, a boutique hotel in Lamu’s Old Town that encapsulates the peaceful and friendly nature of the Swahili coastline. Through his Mombasa office, Sánchez worked on other projects along the coast whose development is deeply rooted in local history and culture. His techniques tell the stories of Africa’s diverse communities, each structure a narrative of identity and resilience. He found joy in the intricate thatched roofs visible in almost every village on the continent, the vibrancy of whitewashed earthen walls, and the seamless integration of buildings into their natural surroundings. At the award‑winning Red Pepper House, another small private house in Lamu with a thatched roof, Sánchez had to balance local tradition with modern conveniences while taking care not to destroy the surrounding mangrove forest. Some of these techniques would go on to be replicated in the Nairobi school project. ‘Every project is unique,’ says Velasco, his rubber boots sloshing over wet leaves outside the kindergarten. ‘We are famous for Swahili architecture because our founder started the work in Lamu and the local context drew us to do that. In Nairobi, we were also faced with environmental issues and that is why the school came out like this.’ ‘The school has triggered serious conversations among the students on the need to protect Kenya’s environment’ The very design of the school is a source of pride not only to the learners but the local community too. Karanja tells the story of a child who brought his friends to the kindergarten classroom ‘just to see the tree popping out of the roof’ – an example of the very interaction with nature that the school was hoping for. ‘Visitors usually confuse the design of the classrooms for a luxury tourist campsite and ask, “where’s the school?”’ It has also triggered serious conversations among the students on the need to protect Kenya’s environment. While hiking local nature trails, they have seen firsthand the country’s dwindling forest cover. ‘They see the diminishing snow on Mount Kenya, the country’s highest peak, as a result of climate change,’ says Karanja. ‘Then they look at their school and understand why we need the trees. More trees mean more rain; more rain results in more snow cover.’ Kioko, the school director, reckons the school’s design does much more than just create a conducive learning environment – it lays the groundwork for nurturing thoughtful, adaptable and globally conscious students that are in tune with the Waldorf style of education. According to the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America, education ‘should address the whole child – their physical wellbeing, their social and emotional wellbeing, and their intellectual, cognitive and spiritual development’, with children being ‘encouraged to engage in imaginative play, hands‑on work, and outdoor and artistic activities’. Since the founding of the first Waldorf school in 1919, this pedagogical philosophy has taken original and often pioneering architectural forms around the world, with natural materials – especially wood – being preferred for early childhood settings. The school’s eco‑friendly elements, Kioko says, serve as live learning tools that encourage students to explore real‑world applications of science and technology. ‘If you look at the national goals of education in Kenya, we are not looking for academics,’ he says. ‘The country aims to bring out a child who will fit in the society. We need thinkers outside the box. We need collaborators. We need people who can critique things, not people who just recall what they were taught in class but who interact with the ecosystem and try to solve the challenges of the real world. That is our goal.’ For Urko Sánchez Architects and the Nairobi Waldorf School Trust community, architecture goes beyond creating structures, becoming a tool to foster connection between people, their culture and their land. At the Karen campus, this was a labour of love for nurturing the future generation and a tribute to the rich architectural heritage of the African continent.

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