Floor Wibaut

Florentinus Marinus (Floor) Wibaut (23 June 1859 – 29 April 1936) was a Dutch businessman and politician for the Social Democratic Workers' Party (SDAP). In 1914, he became Amsterdam's first socialist alderman, nicknamed De Machtige ("The Powerful") due to his influence, and played an important role in building up Amsterdam's social housing system.

He also served as a member of the Senate from 1922 to 1935.

Early life Floor Wibaut was born on 23 June 1859 in Vlissingen as the tenth child of Florentinus Wibaut, a shopkeeper, fuel trader, and municipal council member in Vlissingen, Having grown up in a Roman Catholic family, he attended an exclusive boarding school at the Rolduc monastery. Wibaut had originally wanted to become a priest following the death of his older brother, but was convinced to enrol at a secondary school in Amsterdam by his parents instead, and had abandoned the faith entirely by age 16. Influenced by the ideas of Multatuli, he became an adherent of radical liberalism. Many of these housing projects became examples of the Amsterdam School of architecture. In 1913, he was one of the founders of the Union Internationale des Villes (UIV), later known as the International Union of Local Authorities. He became a member of the UIV's secretariat, where he acted as a conciliatory figure and served as its president from 1925 to 1936. It was pulled down by rioting squatters in 1982, who saw Wibaut as a symbolic figure misused by the Amsterdam municipal government to distract from its own failures in combating the housing crisis, but was soon rebuilt. In 2007, it was temporarily moved into storage and moved to the Rhijnspoorplein in 2010, but returned to the Wibautstraat in 2019.

Personal life Floor Wibaut married feminist Mathilde Berdenis van Berlekom in 1885. The two had met in the 1870s, when Floor Wibaut was 19 and Mathilde Berdenis van Berlekom was 16, via a cousin, and grew close as a result of their shared political views and admiration of the writer Multatuli. When Wibaut proposed to her, Mathilde had initially been hesitant, and the two only got engaged in 1884, a period which they saw as a "trial period" for their marriage, marrying officially a year later. Their first daughter Anna Maria was the mother of VVD politician and International Monetary Fund director Johan Witteveen, their second daughter Josina married Vincent Willem van Gogh, the nephew of the painter Vincent van Gogh, and was the mother of film director Theo van Gogh. Their eldest son Johan Pieter was the father of sculptor Constance Wibaut, and the great-grandfather of Progressive Netherlands MP Suzanne Kröger.

Wibaut also maintained a relationship with writer Johanna Kuiper, who was 37 years younger than him, and eventually also became a close friend of his wife Mathilde despite her initial misgivings.