Ad Hoc Baroque, Marcel Raymaekers’ Salvage Architecture in Postwar Belgium.

For Rotor Marcel Raymaekers, a radical outsider from the established Belgian postwar design scene, deserves rehabilitation.  For nearly 50 years, this drop-out of architecture school bought and restored thousands of tons of antique building components and reused them in hundreds of buildings of his own design. These elements were – and still are – a testimony to past material cultures and the staggering amount of buildings demolished in Belgium since the end of the Second World War. Raymaekers didn’t keep an archive, provided his design services for “free”, and most transactions happened under the radar. Nevertheless, the oeuvre he was able to assemble, and the way he did it, reveals an alternative architectural history of postwar Belgium, and offers glimpses of how design, construction, and labor might have to change to become more circular in the future.

The book launch will feature the books’ four authors, Arne Vande Capelle, Stijn Colon, Lionel Devlieger & James Westcott.
Publisher: Rotor.