The Irish Times

This is a tale of two cities. On the evening that demolition crews began to tear down the towers of Ballymun, in north Dublin, earlier this year, an Irishman in Dresden was opening a museum celebrating the same type of unloved building. Like most former East German cities, Dresden has its share of the prefabricated towers, known as Plattenbau, hurriedly built in the post-war years by the East German authorities to house the millions of people left homeless by the destruction of the second World War. As in Ballymun, East Germans considered themselves lucky to be allocated one of the clean, modern apartments; official neglect and decay came later. The decay continued in the 15 years since unification; now, though, with generations of young people moving west in search of work, eastern German authorities have started to resettle remaining communities and to remove the most visible symbol of East Germany from their skylines. The Irishman has intervened to secure the Plattenbau architectural legacy. "This is an imperfect museum for an imperfect living system of a failed political system," says Ruairķ O'Brien, the architect behind the project.