In this work a new multi-resolution model is proposed for polygonal meshes. It is based on the dual edge collapse, which performs face clustering instead of vertex clustering. The new hierarchical mesh representation combines a truly selective refinement scheme with a strict control of the two-sided Hausdorff distance. The proposed approach allows to build hierarchical meshes directly over non triangulated polygonal models. As most dependencies in the hierarchy are in the form of trees, the resulting representation is very compact and allows for a compressed in-core representation. Furthermore an optimization scheme is proposed for the hierarchy based on variational shape approximation. Key words: Error Controlled Simplification, View-Dependent Visualization, Polygonal Meshes, Hierarchical Modeling