Metal Prototype House (Steel House), Dessau-Törten

Cost-effective and therefore highly flexible building was the envisioned long-term objective of many architects. This objective was also shared by others, for example in that, as with the design of the Weimar experimental house, the painter George Muche had already been in charge of the internal Bauhaus’s development of a metal house. In cooperation with Richard Paulick, instead of with Marcel Breuer as originally planned, he built a corresponding prototype house in Dessau-Törten in 1926–1927. The advantages of this house, which were to lie in its expandable floor plan and short construction period, were overshadowed by a series of defects such as inadequate thermal insulation and ventilation caused by the use of metal as a building material. This was one of the reasons why contemporary critics judged the building to be uninhabitable.