ABSTRACT
A spate of model house exhibitions in the late 1920s and early 1930s gave European Modernist architects the opportunity to promote progressive house designs, although all too often the houses were not as forward-looking as they would appear. The first built design for a steel-framed house to emanate from the Bauhaus was the Haus am Horn, erected at the Bauhaus Exhibition of 1923. It was built on the Bauhaus vegetable garden and named after the am Horn Street in Weimar. Clad in pre-cast concrete panels, the house offered, in terms of prefabication, little that a masonry building could not. With a 5.94 × 5.94m centrally placed living room lit only by clerestoreys, its planning was also deeply flawed. Conceived by the painter Georg Muche, who was head of the Bauhaus exhibition committee, and built with the help of Adolf Meyer, it received some harsh criticism. Although Walter Gropius, then Director of the Bauhaus, tried to distance himself from the Haus am Horn, the two steel houses he was to build at the Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart were really no more successful. Georg Muche, who made a study visit to America in 1924 following the Bauhaus Exhibition, built another house, now with Richard Paulick, on the Torten housing estate at Dessau in 1926-27. Framed in H-columns and I-beams, and then clad with 3mm steel plate, the Stahlhaus is the earliest example of a modern prefabricated steel house to have survived. But although it only loosely follows its gridded plan, there is little poetry in its box-like form (Figure 1.15).
