It may sound like a joke, but a 1920s cow shed on the outskirts of Lübeck in eastern Germany has been one of the major influences on Modern mass housing. The cow shed in question was built by Hugo Häring (1882-1958), the subject of a small yet fascinating exhibition at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London. In the design of this remarkable structure it is possible to see the genesis of the humane Modern Movement housing, particularly of the 1970s, and the work of, say, Ralph Erskine at Byker in Newcastle and Edward Cullinan in suburban London. The reaction against prefab concrete, orthogonal geometry (architect-speak for straight lines) and the barrack-like architecture prescribed by architects over-influenced by the machine aesthetic of the Bauhaus led to a more relaxed, bricky, even tweedy social housing in the 1970s.

It may sound like a joke, but a 1920s cow shed on the outskirts of Lübeck in eastern Germany has been one of the major influences on Modern mass housing. The cow shed in question was built by Hugo Häring (1882-1958), the subject of a small yet fascinating exhibition at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London. In the design of this remarkable structure it is possible to see the genesis of the humane Modern Movement housing, particularly of the 1970s, and the work of, say, Ralph Erskine at Byker in Newcastle and Edward Cullinan in suburban London. The reaction against prefab concrete, orthogonal geometry (architect-speak for straight lines) and the barrack-like architecture prescribed by architects over-influenced by the machine aesthetic of the Bauhaus led to a more relaxed, bricky, even tweedy social housing in the 1970s.

Häring was a rarity at the time: in his 40s when he designed the cow shed, he was an architect who thought that the new machine aesthetic should be flexible enough to be shaped by circumstances. "There was naturally no room for influences of another kind,for folk-art, earthy traditions, Saxon gables surmounted with horses' heads," he wrote in an article about the cow shed published in 1925. "But, even so, the building seems to belong more essentially to its site and landscape than older structures."

Häring may well have been the inspiration - one of them, at least - for the character of Professor Otto Silenus in Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall. Silenus is the humourless young architect commissioned by the interminably fashionable Margot Beste-Chetwynde to demolish her stately pile and replace it with a machine for living. His mission, he says, is to eradicate the human element from architecture; he proposes a house without a staircase, which would spoil the purity of his white, geometric design. His only claim to fame prior to the Beste-Chetwynde commission, we learn, is a design for an unbuilt bubble-gum factory published in an obscure European journal. At the time of the novel Häring would have only been known by a very few avant-garde British architects for his cow shed and his sausage factory (1925-6) at Neustadt, Holstein. John Betjeman was assistant editor of the Architectural Review when Waugh, his friend, was writing Decline and Fall. It is only too easy to imagine them sniggering at the latest funny designs for cow sheds and sausage factories.

by Jonathan Glancey

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