Bulletin KNOB

(Temporarily?) Out of Stock

Tom Broes, Michiel Dehaene — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Voorwoord bij het themanummer.

Housing for Workers, by Workers

Jesse Foster Honsa — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Housing programmes in the early twentieth century were meant to overcome shortages of dwellings for workers in many European industrial centres. Yet what was often overlooked was the fact that housing needed to be built by construction labour, and that labour also needed housing in order to be able to continue working. This article considers how housing scarcity intersected with the overlooked issue of labour scarcity: how the needs of construction workers were or were not addressed. It focuses on garden cities and related suburban settlements in England and Belgium – forms of development which, given their scale, required the mobilization of workers to remote sites, where workers often became the first occupants of what they were building.

The first section considers the earliest garden cities in the UK, designed by Raymond Unwin and his associates: Letchworth, founded in 1903 by Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City Association; and Gretna, developed by the Ministry of Munitions during the First World War to support weapons production. The second section focuses on the post-armistice British housebuilding programme, when local municipalities were granted special subsidies to provide dwellings for workers on large suburban estates. The third section looks at reconstruction efforts in the devastated Westhoek region of Belgium, led by Raphaël Verwilghen and the Dienst der Verwoeste Gewesten (Department of Devastated Regions).

In the British context, the contradictions in housing programmes were clearly articulated: cheap construction labour was needed for cheap dwellings, and this led to a paradox when the producers (workers) were also the consumers (residents). The underlying problem was that cheapness obscured actual costs. In Belgium, the connections were not so obvious: housing was promoted as a do-it-yourself activity, and even social housing was facilitated through a variety of special-interest groups. Nevertheless, in both cases, the unprecedented need for housing in both contexts prompted innovative efforts to house those who build.

De Betoncentrale als Terraformingsmachine

Tom Broes — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article reconstructs how the development of a dense network of concrete plants was crucial in making concrete the basic material of an urbanizing construction culture. Belgium is treated as a paradigmatic case to argue that one – perhaps the main – reason why concrete became the most dominant building material in the world was due to the intensive way in which it was distributed and made available as a self-evident consumer product. The article describes how the relentless output of horizontal rotary kilns compelled the cement industry to adopt a bold 'politics of realization' – ensuring that massive cement volumes being produced actually found their way to the market. The solution lie in the development of a dense logistics network of concrete plants that efficiently produced and delivered ready-mix concrete directly to construction sites – actively shaping urbanization regimes capable of absorbing large volumes of concrete. Spurred on by cement giants CBR (Cimenteries et Briqueteries Réunies), CO (Ciments d’Obourg) and CCB (Compagnie des Ciments Belges), together with the establishment of the BVSB (Belgian Professional Association for Ready-Mix Concrete, 1962) and the IB joint venture (Inter-Beton, 1967), this strategy was increasingly formalized.

In the fragmented Belgian urban landscape, concrete plants spread rapidly across the entire country. During the 1960s and ’70s, this new concrete regime put a veritable form of ‘terraforming’ into practice. Important material flows of sand, water and gravel were rationalized and distributed in bulk to the concrete plants in the network. From there, concrete spread across the country, driving a surge in construction —from major infrastructure to everyday urban practices—that transformed the Belgian landscape.

As Belgium’s construction recession in the late 1970s deepened into a full-blown crisis in the early 1980s, the ready-mix concrete sector was sustained through major public contracts and a strategic pivot toward specialized concrete mixes that unlocked new niche markets. In this way, the concrete plant became increasingly entrenched as an indisputable cause of Belgian urbanization’s ‘cement addiction’. By focusing on the concrete plant, the article provides a new spatial perspective on the political ecology of concrete and raises questions about the sustainability of a building culture in which the overproduction and overcon-sumption of this extractive material is a structural component.

Tijdelijk Beschikbaar

Arne Vande Capelle, Lionel Devlieger — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In order to gain insight into the specifics of circular architecture as a necessary alternative to contemporary extractive building practices, this article examines the work of Marcel Raymaekers. Between 1962 and 2014, the Belgian architect and trader developed a practice in the reuse of building materials. In the post-war context, in which the construction sector began to rely increasingly on cheap, standardised, industrially produced materials, Raymaekers made a radical choice for alternative elements. His aversion to mass-produced elements stemmed from aesthetic preferences. A preference for sensory experiences as a guideline for living, and a great affinity with Assemblage Art, in which a design process starts from existing materials. His way of working was thus characterised by a totally different notion of 'availability' than is common today.

Raymaekers started out as a hunter-gatherer, criss- crossing the country in search of material graveyards and demolition sites. For the first ten years, he worked extensively with materials from industrial waste streams, such as mesh stones (a residual product of sand and gravel extraction) and ship steel (recovered from obsolete ships for the steel processing industry). The immense demolition frenzy of 'Les Trente Glorieuses' also ensured the availability of materials such as bricks and roof tiles, which were recovered and processed in bulk. In addition, many high-quality, unique building components were released, which were finely crafted and ornamented and for which there was no longer any new equivalent on the materials market.

In 1972, he founded Queen of the South (QotS), his materials stock and headquarters in Genk. From then on, Raymaekers became a permanent trader-designer. His established network of demolition contractors and wholesalers was crucial in this regard. During his career, he developed close partnerships with players such as reuse wholesaler Spinois and demolition contractors Scheerlinck, Leunen and Vander Elst, each active in their own geographical area and building niche. Raymaekers' architecture became increasingly baroque, but also more homogeneous due to his focus on architectural antiques. QotS was set up as a veritable machine for convincing people of the power of these elements.

From the 1980s onwards, the supply of building antiques declined due to the mechanisation of the demolition sector, rising labour costs and the increasing clout of heritage protection. His supply chains came to a standstill. Raymaekers began importing more materials from abroad. His practice became increasingly exclusive, targeting wealthy clients, although he also continued to build for middle-class clients through self-build and long-term construction projects. Eventually, Raymaekers had to go as far as India to find building materials. After 2000, the influx of materials became too expensive and too difficult, and clients began to stay away. In 2014, QotS went bankrupt.

Raymaekers' work shows how circular architecture depends on locally anchored supply networks, which are difficult to scale up due to the nature of the urban mine, where a wide variety of materials are released unpredictably, scattered and in small quantities. His practice was also strongly linked to a specific phase in the urbanisation and modernisation process: the period of unbridled demolition of pre-war buildings. Raymaekers' identity as a designer-trader was so intertwined with this period that his business inevitably ceased to exist with the demise of the ideology of progress that had given rise to it. This case study shows that the sustainable matching of supply and demand in second-hand materials will always have to be dynamic.

Material Gardens

Chiara Pradel — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, the notion of material harvesting, collection, and reworking has gained significant attention as a crucial step in understanding essential aspects of building culture, particularly in relation to reuse, ma-terial scarcity, or, conversely, material availability. The ‘Recycling Beauty’ exhibition (Fondazione Prada, Milan 2022), which displayed Greek and Roman spolia, marble fragments, and pieces of sculptures placed alongside one other, alluded to practices of appropriation and possession, to the relationship between craftsmen and found resources, and to the need to store and preserve material in times of scarcity or political uncertainty. Similar questions have emerged in Dutch and Belgian contexts, for example, from research into the work of designer Marcel Raymaekers and his way of organizing salvaged materials (Marcel Raymaekers, pioneer in circular architecture, Vai, Antwerp 2023). Besides highlighting the relevance of practices linked to material reuse, exhibitions and installations also make clear by their very organization, how material collections take space and, at the same time, sculpt ever-changing landscapes.

Building on these premises, and shifting the focus towards contemporary and less curated cases, this article critically examines the purpose, spatial qualities and configurations of three material storage typologies in the Dutch context – bricks and tiles, soil, and trees – highlighting their pivotal role in relation to material accessibility and availability. These sites, termed ‘material gardens’, are understood as experimental laboratories or ‘banks’, where the notion of availability is translated into the allocation and management of (material) reserves.

Though often overlooked and considered marginal, such open spaces are in fact key sites where design and other creative processes are crucially tied to resource allocation and disposal, and impact collective imagination and practices. They are increasingly being positioned at the core of construction and deconstruction processes, raising relevant ecological questions and helping to shape tacit knowledge on material reuse.