The past or the future? Accompanied by this slogan, the inhabitants of the Neustadt district of Dresden have been weighing up the pros and cons of Daniel Libeskind’s new “visionary” project which has been put forward to the town authorities. On one side are those who mourn the loss of the way the area looked prior to the bombing during the Second World War which destroyed the city. On the other are just as many who fear remaining stuck in the past and ending up living in a kind of museum-city, unable to accept the age in which it exists.

One thing is certain, Libeskind’s building – a giant warehouse for art, with an 11 million euro budget – will not pass unobserved. The structure, mostly glazed, could almost be defined as “cubist” with its sharp and fragmented lines - in sharp contrast with the baroque nature of the surrounding buildings, the work of Wolf Caspar von Klengel.