Baukasten by Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer (1922-1923)

The seeds of the fascination with the prefabrication within the Bauhaus began in unrealized projects conceived during the Weimar years. In 1922 Walter Gropius established an "estate co-operative" that Fred Forbat, a young Hungarian architect, was charged with developing. Between 1922 and 1923, Gropius and Adolf Meyer would develop a system, called Baukasten ("building blocks"), of standard, industrially produced building elements that could function as a variable kit of parts, interlocking to form a near infinite array of configurations. Gropius and Meyer envisioned that architects would guide the client through the system employing a scale model to illustrate possible configurations. Gropius himself described the system as "an oversized set of toy building blocks out of which, depending on the number of inhabitants and their needs, different type of machines for living can be assembled." The material palette included wood, steel, and glass and had the potential to align and combine materials in unexpected, original ways.

Although never built, these prototypical designs served as the point of departure for several of the concrete-panel, industrially produced housing blocks built once the Bauhaus had moved to the industrial city of Dessau a few years later. These marked the Bauhaus's turn toward a philosophy of rationalization to achieve a new unity of art and industry. In 1926, Georg Muche and Richard Paulick designed a steel prefabricated house for the Dessau-Torten housing development that was being overseen by Gropius. In 1927 Marcel Breuer designed two separate steel-framed prefabricated houses, called Bambos I and Bambos II, designed for the younger Bauhaus masters but never built.

(Source: Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling by Barry Bergdoll and Peter Christensen)