English
Arabic
French
Spanish
Portuguese
Deutsch
Turkish
Dutch
Italiano
Russian
Romaian
Portuguese (Brazil)
Greek
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
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
·128 Views
