Metastadt
, Dorsten
The Metastadt was one of the few realizations of technical utopia of the 1960s. Architects around the world have been working on a standardized, industrially manufactured room system with variable frames for a wide variety of architectural uses. In fact, building systems made of a reinforced concrete skeleton with standard components have been designed and marketed several times. Complete, prefabricated room units, however, remained rare.
The Munich architect Richard J. Dietrich had done development work since 1965 and founded a prefabricated house company to implement a kind of " Metastadt System ". He emphasized that this system should only serve as a supplement and not as a substitute for the traditional city. In Wulfen, on the other hand, the "Metastadt" became part of a large new development area, the "Neue Stadt Wulfen".
The construction system is reduced to a manageable number of individual elements. In addition to a few construction elements and facade parts, there are walls, ceiling elements, sanitary blocks and built-in cupboards.
The experimental residential building "Metastadt" comprised 103 social housing units and a kindergarten and several shops on the ground floor. Originally, a much wider facility had been planned. The terraced and staggered building formation had a differentiated, bodily overall structure. This was formed from a rigid steel structure in which the individual cubes with a side length of 4.20 metres and a height of 3.60 metres could be stacked as required. The extremely austere design of the cubes and their constant repetition, however, resulted in a rather simple and unambitious appearance.
The plans for the entire "New Town of Wulfen" with 50,000 people turned out to be oversized early on. Lack of care deteriorated the building fabric of the metropolis. Remediation costs of DM 10 million were calculated. The dismantling was much cheaper, so that the metropolis was eliminated in 1987.