DUBLIN — As an emblem of the modern Irish condition, Frank Buckley is almost too apt. Dead broke, he lives in a house made of money.

Euros here, euros there. Euros in the fireplace. Euros on the floor, on the chairs, in the windows. Worthless euros, taken out of circulation and shredded by Ireland’s Central Bank, forming the interior walls of an apartment that Mr. Buckley does not own in a building left vacant by the country’s economic ruin.

Mr. Buckley, 50, calls the apartment — built from thousands of bricks of shredded, decommissioned cash(each brick contains, roughly, what used to be 50,000 euros) — the Billion Euro House. He reckons that about 1.4 billion euros actually went into it, but the joke, of course, is that it is worth simultaneously so much and so little.

“Everything is centered on the euro, but euros are only pieces of paper,” he said. “It’s what people do with the euros, the value we put on them, that changes their meaning.” […]

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Ever wonder what happens to misprinted currency? In the case of decommissioned Euro notes, the money gets shredded and formed into a papery brick. The blocks hold no monetary value and are likely viewed as useless hunks of paper by the masses, but not to Irish artist, Frank Buckley. Buckley collected the pulped bricks totalling over 1 billion euro’s worth of paper shredded to build his art installation. [...]

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A clip from the official launch of the Billion Euro House and Gallery on 5th April 2012.

The House was opened by Robert Ballagh, who designed the Irish euro notes which now coat the walls and floors of the Billion Euro House!

Click here to read the irishtimes.com article.

Meanwhile, the Billion Euro House shoots straight to the top of Google at 3rd Feb 2012:

Now India knows about the Billion Euro House!

Read the full article here.

See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/31/frank-buckley-billion-euro-house_n_1244590.html

http://gizmodo.com/5879589/this-is-a-billion-euro-house-literally

Click here to listen to the interview (Frank’s interview is at 8 minutes)

Stephanie Hegarty has published a feature article on the BBC News Magazine website, see it here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00n0f2z

See http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/01/28/broke-irishman-builds-billion-euro-house-out-of-shredded-bills/