A NEW, exclusive hotel opens in Dublin on Friday. This short-stay venue will run for a limited period only and promises to offer a unique, once-in-a-lifetime experience for the visitor. Occupying the top floor of an apartment complex, the small boutique hotel offers spectacular, penthouse views of Dublin city, while each individuallydesigned, minimalist room features custommade furniture. Inhouse entertainment will be provided each evening and a wide range of amenities can be discovered in the area, including a leisure complex, cinema multiplex, golf course, the National Botanic Gardens and the Helix. And the name of this fabulous new destination? Hotel Ballymun.

Running a temporary hotel in Ballymun's Clarke Tower, which is due to be demolished this spring, is the brainchild of young Irish artist Seamus Nolan. A Tipperary-born NCAD graduate, he was commissioned by Breaking Ground, the Ballymun Regeneration Ltd (BRL) Per Cent for Art scheme, to create a new work in collaboration with the local community.

The result, Hotel Ballymun, will run from 23 March until 18 April. Through the mobilisation of a wide range of local organisations and volunteers, as well as BRL and Dublin City Council, the top floor of the rundown building - one of the few remaining tower blocks in a rapidly changing urban landscape - has been converted into a "hotel". There are nine single and double bedrooms, as well as a garden room, TV lounge, communal kitchen, breakfast area and conference centre. The rooms are furnished with quirky one-off pieces which have been remodelled from furniture left behind by former residents. These were designed by locals who participated in workshops with Irish designers Sticks and recent RCA graduate Jonathan Legge.

The hotel will be open to the public from 2pm to 5pm and, after the guests check in each evening, some form of entertainment will take place, such as music, performances, talks, readings and exhibitions.

According to Breaking Ground artistic director Aisling Prior, there has been a phenomenal response to the project, with rooms booking up quickly and visitors from a wide range of backgrounds coming from all over the country to spend a night. The response locally has also been very positive, she says, and a lot of people have been employed to get the hotel ready and then to run it. One woman, who used to live in the top floor of Clarke Tower, for example, is now being employed as a cleaner in her former home.

But what is the reasoning behind Hotel Ballymun? "Everything you hear about Ballymun, it's always bad press - junkies and dealers and violence. But when you come here and get involved in the organisations and actually go to one of the flats and see the amount of activity that's going on? it's such a shame that on the surface it gets all the bad publicity, " Nolan explains. "So the idea came from thinking about highlighting the community groups, and to get all this work done without getting people from outside."

The project establishes an intriguing juxtaposition between the failed utopia, as represented by the modernist tower-block architecture in Ballymun, and the dream of utopia we tap into when going on holidays to some exotic destination. Ballymun, once perceived by many as a no-go area, has thus become a "destination" of sorts. While Nolan admits that the project could be criticised for encouraging what he calls "poverty tourism", the softly-spoken artist insists that this is not the intention. "It's not a poverty of imagination in terms of the people who live here. If there is poverty, it's the policy of bureaucratic poverty. There's nothing wrong with the spaces themselves and this environment, this land - it's the system that's running it."

"Nolan is very interested in the notion of waste, consumerism and not valuing any of the things that are considered disposable, " Prior remarks. "The architecture of the towers is considered defunct now and is being demolished, but what he was suggesting through his project was that if the services had served the community better, there wouldn't have been any need to demolish the tower blocks - that there was no innate badness in the architecture. You can see that if you're there now: the rooms are very well proportioned, there's a huge amount of light, they're warm, there's good soundproofing."

Hotel Ballymun reflects upon what the towers have come to represent in the public imagination, but by reimagining and reconfiguring the abandoned topfloor flats, it also encourages us to reassess our preconceptions. "There was a lot of talk of whether the towers should be kept or not, " says Nolan. "But without taking anything for granted, I'm just asking the question:

are these devalued spaces, or are they just spaces?"

Interestingly, with all the redevelopment in the area, two hotels have sprung up opposite the tower - the Days Inn and Ballymun Plaza Hotel. "It's raising the value of the view. You can now buy the view for a lot of money, whereas before you could be pushed into it, " says Nolan. "Ballymun itself has such a strong stigma; it's put people off before but the regeneration is putting some value into it. Hotel Ballymun is looking at the value that's there already - the size of the apartments, the view, the actual communities, the people of Ballymun and how it operates day to day."

But with the imminent demolition of Clarke Tower, the community is on the cusp of change, and Hotel Ballymun seems to mark this important juncture. The project commemorates the end of an era: in a few weeks' time, it will no longer be possible to see the amazing views from the top of Clarke Tower. It will be nothing more than a memory - but it should be an unforgettable one.

To book your stay at Hotel Ballymun, see www. hotelballymun. com. Bookings are restricted to one night. A returnable deposit of �35 per room is required. Staying at the hotel is free, but there is a suggested donation of �50/ �30 concessions