Vilu Františka Wawerky will not be saved even by the status of a cultural monument

The figurative metaphor for the life and creative fate of the Oehler couple - a directive-driven process of forgetting, erasing, and outright destruction of their work - is one of the most interesting and highest quality functionalist villas in Central Moravia - the house of František Wawerka in Lipník nad Bečvou. The building from 1937 served its owners for only a very short time, and after 1945, it was condemned to a gradual decline, which was not interrupted even by the year 1989. Although the villa was classified as a protected cultural monument, today it remains only an uninhabitable ruin, and its fate seems sealed.
František Wawerka (1910 - 2000) was the heir of the Lipník factory for building materials and machine tools. He began to take a more significant role in managing the family business from the mid-1930s. He and his wife Milada moved into the new villa, built according to the design of the Oehler couple next to the factory and a park by the older residential house of his parents, shortly after their marriage in 1937. However, the Wawerkas could only experience a single decade of relatively peaceful life in their new home. The factory was nationalized in the first post-war wave, and a similar fate soon befell the villa. The couple was displaced to Přerov, František was then sentenced to five years in prison in a staged trial, while Milada struggled to find menial jobs.
A similar fate awaited the house itself on Loučská Street 29. In 1958, it was insensitively adapted. František's rehabilitation in 1968 was merely symbolic, and after the November revolution of 1989, only the villa was returned to the couple as part of the restitution, not the factory, which was privatized. Given their age, the Wawerkas offered the house to the city, but it refused the gift. The couple then transferred the villa to a relative, who promptly sold it to the management of the former Wawerka factory, now Strojtos Lipník a.s.. The owners commissioned a project for reconstruction from Prague architect Oleg Haman; however, the repairs soon stalled, and the abandoned villa continues to deteriorate, even though it has been declared a cultural monument by the Ministry of Culture.
The National Heritage Institute has only one tool to encourage the owner to take proper care of the villa: a financial penalty. This tool, however, is not used very often, and its effectiveness is also questionable. Thus, the destruction of the villa of František Wawerka, which experts consider to be the Central Moravian equivalent of the famous Tugendhat villa in Brno, is highly likely.
The nostalgic emphasis on the past that Oskar Oehler expressed in October 1972, just a few months before his death, in a letter to architect Vladimír Šlapeta, is in this context indicative not only for the specific villa in Lipník nad Bečvou but generally for the change in value hierarchy in the second half of the 20th and the 21st century: "Dear colleague, I used to say: with every building, I build myself. With every building, I give others happiness (they live more happily in my building than before), with every successful building, I gain a friend… for the rest of my life… how beautiful our profession was…".