Poor Old Villa van Waning
Villa van Waning was built in 1898 as the headquarters of the van Waning cement factory in Rotterdam. At a certain point the company moved to Capelle aan de Ijssel and the factory was demolished, leaving the Nassau Park. And the villa remained, since it’s on the national monument list. The city bought it but it stayed neglected and unloved, until a group of squatters occupied it in the late 1990s.
They stayed in the building for ten years or so, keeping it maintained, until the council decided to evict them in 2008 or so. Ever since it’s been standing empty! It looks so sad, the windows are covered with metal and it must be in a bad state inside having not been heated for so long.
There are plans afoot to turn the building into a local neighbourhood centre, which sounds questionable to me to be frank, it depends if that is really the plan or if some money-grubbing bastard wants to set up a classy wine bar for the yuppies that are moving in as part of the “revitalisation” of the area. But yes, OK, it would be good if the building were to be used in some way again.
What’s terrible is that the squatters, who as far as I know didn’t piss anyone off had to leave for nothing. That’s really stupid. No-one likes a neglected building. They should have stayed until there was a plan which was about to be implemented.
It seems like there have been various problems on the route to change, the main one being the council’s reluctance to sell the building off. Concerns are being expressed on all sides for years already, but nothing actually happens. Time for a resquat? I’m not keen on facebook, however in this particular case it seems the best way to keep track of the story. The fotos in the article are from that page.
