In 1927 a pioneering new estate opened its doors on a hillside overlooking the German city of Stuttgart. It was a radical development with houses and apartments designed by the most provocative architects of the day such as Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier and Mies van de Rohe.
The Weissenhof estate with its concrete cubic forms and functional exteriors boasted swiftly assembled prefabricated buildings with steel skeleton frames which were designed to reduce costs and improve living conditions for the poor. For some it was the future.
Today on one of the estate’s side streets is a small glass box of a house. It too represents the future. The building is 914 square feet, with a prefabricated timber frame covered in glass fiber fabric. The windows which stretch the length of one side of the building are only 17 millimeters thick but consist of three layers of glass and keep cold and heat at bay. There are no environmentally unsound features such as plaster, glue or primer, let alone window frames set in bricks and made to fit with polyurethane, concrete and plaster.
Called B 10 after its street number on the estate’s Brukmannweg, the house was assembled in a few months and hoisted by crane into place over two days. Clean, functional, efficient, the building uses zero energy - absolutely no fossil fuels or nuclear power here - it produces zero emissions and it can be taken down and recycled to leave zero waste.