Ad Hoc Baroque: Marcel Raymaekers & Salvage Architecture in Postwar Belgium documents the extraordinary career of a self-taught builder who spent nearly five decades rescuing antique building components from Belgium's postwar demolition wave and weaving them into hundreds of new structures.
About This Book
Marcel Raymaekers was not a licensed architect, but his influence on the Belgian built environment was substantial and strange. Operating through his business empire Queen of the South — part antiques salvage yard, part nightclub, restaurant, and jazz venue — Raymaekers sold visions of nobility to Belgium's expanding middle class from the 1970s through the 1990s. This book traces how he acquired and redeployed thousands of tonnes of salvaged building fabric: ornate stonework, timber joinery, decorative ironwork, and other elements rescued from buildings demolished in the decades following the Second World War. It is a study in material culture, adaptive reuse, and the complicated histories that objects carry across contexts.
Key Features
- 196 pages of documentary and critical content examining salvage architecture and material reuse in Belgium
- Authors: A. V. Capelle, S. Colon, L. Devlieger, J. Westcott
- Published by Rotor vzw, ISBN 9789464776652
What You'll Discover
- How Raymaekers built a business empire that fused antiques salvage with hospitality to fund and fuel his architectural practice
- The scale of Belgium's postwar demolition and what was lost — and what Raymaekers managed to preserve — in terms of historic building fabric
- How salvaged components function simultaneously as material evidence of past craft traditions and as active building elements in new construction
- The tension between heritage preservation, adaptive reuse, and the commercialisation of historical aesthetics for a aspirational middle-class market
About the Author
The book is authored by A. V. Capelle, S. Colon, L. Devlieger, and J. Westcott, and is published by Rotor vzw, the Brussels-based organisation known for its research and practice around the reuse of building components and materials. Further biographical details are [Details available upon request].
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 196
- Dimensions: 30 × 21 cm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9789464776652
- Publisher: Rotor vzw
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Architects and designers engaged with adaptive reuse and circular construction, architectural historians researching postwar European building culture, and anyone with a serious interest in material salvage, craft heritage, and the social history of the built environment.