The German city is demolishing its notorious tower blocks, but an Irishman has a plan to commemorate them, writes Derek Scally.
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 Ruairí O'Brien, the architect behind the project. He had already made a name for himself in Dresden with several innovative projects, including a "micromuseum" concept he invented and used to great effect to celebrate the German author Erich Kästner.
O'Brien's Plattenbau Museum is in Johannstadt, Dresden's high-rise district, on the site of a demolished factory that spent 40 years churning out the panels for the buildings that would house entire generations.
The outdoor museum is laid out on a site 100 metres long and 50 metres wide. Visitors walk along concrete paving stones that serve as a time line, leading them through the development of the Plattenbau, shown in an abstract, fragmentary way that encourages visitors to think about the buildings with a fresh perspective. The journey begins at the remnants of a former children's hospital on the site, through the factory era to the wild garden at the end, representing the "blooming landscapes" former chancellor Helmut Kohl promised to easterners at the time of unification.
On display in between is fascinating material rescued before the factory was demolished, such as the first Plattenbau panels manufactured from the pulverised ruins of pre-war Dresden buildings destroyed by Allied firebomb attacks in February 1944.
As the exhibition progresses, visitors see the original concrete casts produced as engineers tried to improve design and reduce costs. One of the last exhibits is a pile of panels from the different generations of Plattenbau, sitting cheerlessly on top of each other.
"It's a homage to a space, a people and a time, but it's not glorifying the Plattenbau," says O'Brien. "It's a discussion of modular living and ways of building. How much space does a person need to live?"
It remains a relevant discussion in both Germany and Ireland, he says, pointing to the uncontrolled urban sprawl from Dublin and Ireland's endless planning discussion. "Without modular building methods how else are we going to be able to give young people cheap accommodation with access to the city centre?"
Johannstadt proved the perfect location: compared with Ballymun and other such settlements, Johannstadt is a relatively small development close to the city centre well served by public transport, rather than an isolated satellite town. The project has gone down well with initially sceptical locals and become an integral part of the landscape.
"In this context and this neighbourhood, these broken pieces of Plattenbau have a meaning," says O'Brien. "Without this museum this scrap would have ended up in a motorway."
That's the fate awaiting the Ballymun tower blocks. Rather than preserving elements of the towers, Ballymun Regeneration plans to preserve the memories of the community.
"There is no proposal to keep a block of flats as a museum. We are preserving the legacy of Ballymun by not changing its name," says Eamon Farrelly of Ballymun Regeneration. "We have documented the history of the area and are carrying out an ongoing oral-history project with residents past and present."
Ruairí O'Brien doubts that will be enough to preserve the past and prevent a future outbreak of Ballymun nostalgia. "It would be great to create a museum for Ballymun, to help it live on - and not as a mistake. There will come a time when people will say: 'I was born there, you cannot delete my past,' " he says. "Like it or not, Ballymun is part of Irish architectural history. You can be intelligent and celebrate failure, because that leads to success. If you don't keep something of that failure then you are likely to make the same mistakes again."
