Report - Val Benoit University - Belgium - August 2013

[Chaos]

Val Benoit University - Belgium



Visited with Nobby and Markymark


History

Expansion continued in the following century. Being the owner, since 1924, of 8 hectares of land around the ruins of the ancient Cistercian Abbey of the Val-Benoit, the Liege University plans to build five new sets: an Institute of Applied Chemistry and Metallurgy, an Institute of Mineral Sciences, a Laboratory of Thermodynamics coupled to a power plant, an Institute of Mechanics and one last Civil Engineering Institute.

Work began in 1930. In November 1937, King Leopold III inaugurated the Institute of Chemistry and Metallurgy, the Institute of Civil Engineering, and the Laboratory of Thermodynamics. The Mechanics Institute was inaugurated shortly before the second world war.

In the late 1950s, the University of Liège embarked on the long adventure of migrating all its activities to the Liège district named Sart Tilman. A little more than twenty years after the inauguration of its first buildings, the premature demise of the Val Benoit campus had been planned. The University of Liege finally left the campus in 2006​

Report

It was already getting late so we tagged this onto the end of a day. When we arrived, there was a huge security presence at the front of the building. Loads of G4S vans and quite a few guys milling about. We briefly wondered weather this was a good idea or not and soon put those thoughts to bed and got on with it. We made our way inside quickly and easily and found ourselves in the Chemistry labs. This place is trashed beyond belief. Looking at a few reports from a couple of years ago shows that there used to be some nice little artefacts still laying around. Not any more, the vandals and metal thieves have gone to town on this place which made it quite uninspiring. We snapped away for a couple of hours and then went and camped up for the night!


1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

​