Mechtild Schoenberger
Ammerland, Germany
2024

We visited Mechtild Schoenberger around Easter 2024 in Ammerland, Germany. Interviewing her in her own house meant understanding one of the core projects of her career as an architect. She built the timber house, when she was 39 years old - today this would be considered an extremely young architect - as experience and the learning procedure of building are such a long endeavor.

Mechtild grew up in Bavaria, near lake Starnberg, for most of her childhood and adolescence. She knew the region where she would later build the house from a young age on and returned to the area to stay. 30 years later the house stands today as a tribute to a timeless, effortless, natural building style that Mechtild Schoenberger was already convinced of when designing and building the house as a young architect in the 1980s.

As a mother of four, Mechtild speaks about balancing her career and children, a topic often debated today, as we tend to see less or hardly any women in the field of architecture after becoming mothers. The house accommodates her office too, on the top floor, where she worked independently for most of her life, collaborating with others as projects required and allowed.

She spoke to us about the initial steps of designing, together with a water diviner and an engineer she respected very much, about finding the right spot on the lot to build, about the open floor plan and natural building materials. The hybrid brick-timber construction regulates the temperature without any mechanical cooling, the cork insulation came from Portugal back in the days, and helps to keep a comfortable climate for most of the year. She also speaks about challenges on the building site and those inherent to the profession of architecture.

For us, as for Mechtild, it was an experiment to conduct this interview - as one of us, Charlotte, grew up as her daughter in this exact house. Initially we weren't sure how the interview would go - all of a sudden confronted with a professional distance and interest, with questions and answers back and forth between us, solely focused on her work.

It was a beautiful moment, full of mutual respect for the craft and the profession and yet another moment of realization that some convictions we are raised with are deeply rooted in us and will find their way back into our own work with time. Her work was truly pioneering - and studying houses all around the world has only heightened this appreciation.

Proudly we present her work to you - the work of a woman, who aimed and aims to build locally, naturally and timelessly.