Behind Vrijbroek Park in Mechelen lies this megalomaniac project, which was once intended to be a large, posh hotel. It was supposed to be a 19-story luxury hotel, but it never got built beyond two stories. By the time the second story was completed, it was discovered that the architect had miscalculated the subsoil's stability, and the building was slowly but surely sinking into the ground. Work was immediately halted, and today, more than 40 years later, only this concrete ruin, overgrown with greenery and graffiti, remains.
At the end of 2019, the Antwerp Provincial Council decided to purchase the ruins. The plan is to partially integrate them into Vrijbroek Park and partially utilize them as a nature project. A bat habitat will be created in that area.
This is where my urban exploring adventure effectively began. Although my natural curiosity had prompted me many times before to poke around in abandoned buildings, I hadn't heard of "urban exploring" yet. This was actually the first time I ventured into one of these buildings, armed with a camera. When I started researching the background of what I had just photographed, I soon discovered that this was actually a whole thing, that it had a name and that there was iin fact a whole community surrounding it...

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