Actually I lived there in the plattenbau monstrosity about a dozen years ago - they were roughly twenty years old and already in bad shape.  Remember, I was born in the US and grew up in the US and Switzerland. When I travelled to Poland for summers and Christmas I mostly stayed either in my grandfather's Krakow apartment - a really nice early twenties bourgeois type place right between the old town and the castle overlooking the park that rings the old town. Or I spent time in the mountain resort of Zakopane where my family has had a vacation home since the thirties. Or on my grand aunt's small farm - very small and primitive house but it had a certain taste of exoticism and adventure for a middle class Western kid like me - look, no running water, draw the bucket up from the pretty well :)

I have no idea what to call a Plattenbau in English, I generally just say 'housing project' though that isn't an ideal translation it does work better than a literal one - 'large concrete slab building'.  The sixties and seventies era was the worst period for 'architecture' in Poland (badly designed hideousness would be a better term). The stalinist era buildings are ugly but at least they're solid. The eighties stuff is unattractive but nowhere near as bad as what preceded it.