Spotlight on Women Architects: Margot Schürmann

There is an anecdote about Margot Schürmann; it well illustrates just how iron-willed this important architect actually was. At the beginning of the 1970s, the practice she ran together with her husband took part in the competition for Germany’s federal government buildings in Bonn. It was the evening before the deadline, the team working on the potential job was busy labeling the plans that they would be submitting when suddenly Margot Schürmann came back into the office and started looking through the papers that were being entered for the competition. Although everything had been drafted just the way that she, her husband, and the team had agreed and how everything had been approved, she just wasn’t satisfied with the colors used to code the relevant functions of the buildings had been displayed on an urban-planning level. The project architect responsible refused to redraft the plans – which were, after all, larger than a table-tennis table – simply because of their colors. So, the boss herself sat down, worked all night and produced the plans colored just the way she wanted them, ready to be handed in. Her practice still didn’t win the competition., Something that nonetheless fitted in with her credo. She would rather have her projects “properly wrong” and consistent in every respect than change them half the way through.

Margot Schürmann was born Margot Schwilling on August 18, 1924, in Ludwigshafen. Her father was renowned architect Willy Schwilling, whose designs included the “Waldstadion” (forest stadium) in Homburg in the state of Saarland. She started studying Architecture in Munich during World War II and continued her studies in Darmstadt after the War was over. She met Joachim Schürmann at the Technical University’s Bach Choir. She and Schürmann, who hailed from the Rhineland, married in 1949, after graduating and finding their first jobs. He started out with Wilhelm Wucherpfennig in Cologne while she initially worked for her father before subsequently also finding work in Cologne in Karl Hell’s architecture practice.

Their first jobs on their own accounts were modernizations of two Romanesque churches in Cologne which had been lying in ruins since the end of the War but were now to be gradually rebuilt, as true to the originals as possible. Thus, over time, they made a considerable contribution to the face of the city that had been repeatedly razed to the ground, bar the cathedral. The crypt of the magnificent domed St. Gereon Basilica was restored in 1956. Starting that same year and continuing right up until 1960, the church of St. Clemens in Mülheim on the right bank of the Rhine was also reconstructed.

The young couple designed a house of their own built, which was then built in Deckstein, a district of Cologne, by 1957. This single-story structure bends around a corner of the street, creating privacy for the garden behind it. Very much guided by the spirit of Modernism prevalent in the architecture of the time, the edifice references two role models who considerably influenced the couple – Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Alvar Aalto – without this remarkably mature early work manifesting heavy-handed allusions of any description. The building, with its precise floor plan, was to become a permanent home to both the couple’s offices and to their family, as would, at a later date, the pergola covered in wisteria and the garden.

In his fine monograph on the practice, Manfred Sack includes an interview with Margot Schürmann about the purpose of her architecture, “which was aimed at reproducing a certain perfection approaching that of an egg, from which nothing has been omitted but to which nothing can be added.” And in point of fact, this objective is visible not only in that first house for their own family but also in those designed immediately thereafter. Margot was responsible for designing the Gold House and the Rautenstrauch House, both in Cologne (1958 and 1959 respectively), then the wonderful house for Joachim Schürmann’s brother, sculptor Werner Schürmann, not far from the Irish capital of Dublin, the latter’s sculptures embellishing not only their own garden in Cologne but also, repeatedly, other projects as well – such as the Church of St. Pius Xthin Cologne (1958–1961). The courtyard house in Ireland is probably one of the most beautiful buildings in an oeuvre that is itself so rich in beautiful edifices. Enveloped by thick brick walls, it opens out almost exclusively onto a courtyard edged by supports made of solid timber. The living quarters for a family of six have been arranged around an inner outside space, a few small windows allow for controlled views of the world outside, all this designed in such a way that by 1964 the client and two assistants were able to erect the building largely by themselves.

A type of work they pursued at the beginning of their careers turned out to be a regular source of income for the couple with ecclesiastical architecture becoming a recurrent element in Margot and Joachim Schürmann’s output. As well as the abovementioned Church of St. Pius Xth in Flittard, they planned the Christ the King Church in Wuppertal, completed by 1960, which represents a variation on the architectural theme of a roof that appears to be hovering above solid walls. With their St. Sebastian Abbey in Neuss and their rigorous Klöcker House in Cologne, as of 1960 the couple embarked on a noticeably Brutalist phase of their oeuvre, perhaps the finest testimony to which is a house with an almost Japanese look to it on the heights of Darmstadt’s Rosenhöhe district. This structure served them both as a residence and as a studio. Built to mark Joachim Schürmann’s appointment to the Chair of Building Design at TU Darmstadt, the edifice arranges both the living space and the garden’s courtyards on a square grid. The space that was once a beautiful front garden facing the street has now been blocked by two identical detached houses, thus making somebody a pretty penny.

At the end of the 1960s, the City of Cologne debated how to breathe new life into the old town between the cathedral and Heumarkt, and work started on the Schürmanns’ magnum opus. The Gross St. Martin’s Church was renovated and modernized by Margot and Joachim Schürmann and their team with exactly the same attention to detail that they had demonstrated with their first two churches in the 1950s. The result is one of the most beautiful church interiors in Cologne. Around the church with its striking top a whole district was redeveloped. The structure of the old town was reinterpreted using the kind of contemporary architectural idiom that only few architects were capable of deploying at the time. Here, Margot and Joachim Schürmann worked on small sections at a time and use traditional, historical elements such as balconies, oriels, projecting and recessed elements and different roof shapes, thus completely integrating their new buildings into the existing fabric of Cologne’s old town. Their own offices were designed as the finishing touch to the Martinsquartier district with their address at Lintgasse 9 acting as a “branch office, but downtown”. The building was planned for a staff of 20 and designed in such a way that the various stories could also be converted into apartments.

Margot Schürmann once said about her husband “sometimes he has a crazy idea – but one that is really good.” Joachim Schürmann in turn called his wife “a master of layouts.” In the studio, precision and accuracy were considered invaluable assets, assets of a kind that took not only their employees but also those people who worked out the load-bearing properties for their designs and those who had to realize the projects on the construction sites to their very limits; And Margot herself never really raised her voice but was decidedly resolute; if in doubt, she expected herself and her employees to be prepared to put in night shifts. Although the atmosphere in the office was described as “familiar”, at the same time there was never any doubt about who was in charge. This could mean that employees, even those of many years’ standing who had joined at an early date, might at some point turn their backs on the practice because there was no prospect of a partnership. Nevertheless, they did tend to describe their time with Margot and Joachim as “character-building” and of crucial importance to their own careers. And indeed, all the couple’s four children – two daughters, two sons – have all somehow been involved in architecture and have, over time, taken repeated part in various of the practice’s projects. In the 1980s and 1990s and in the same lineup they proved that they were also capable of implementing even large built volumes with the same precision. For Postamt 3, they realized a giant, yet appropriately graceful new building for the mail sorting center in Cologne, as they did with the Engelbert Kämpfer Gymnasium in Lemgo and the Sparkasse savings bank in Lüdenscheid.

Starting in1989, Margot and Joachim Schürmann worked on a project that has, right up until the present day, been associated with their name, one that was initially designed as an office building for seconded officials and is presently used by Deutsche Welle, the German state broadcasting company. This edifice consisting of three blocks behind one another and slightly staggered, echoing the sweeping style of the existing buildings around the south wing of the Plenary Hall and the old Office Building for Members of the Bundestag along Kurt Schumacher Strasse in Bonn, evidently companion pieces to Egon Eiermann’s high-rise tower. With their pergolas facing the Rheinaue meadows, they blend in with the existing landscape as if they had been made for it and represent variations on the basic themes of addition and subtraction. A thoroughly unpretentious structure and one which entirely complies with its brief, while remaining quietly confident about itself and not feeling that it has to hide from its celebrated neighbors.

In 1991, completion was delayed by flooding and in 2002 it was disparaged by the media as a “scandalous building” because of difficulties with the construction companies involved, but Margot Schürmann did not experience any of these things and her receipt of the Grand BDA Award in 2008 could not affect her either. She died in Venice in 1998, almost 24 years to the day before her husband. Bearing in mind the social conventions of the 1950s and 1960s, she tended to rub people up the wrong way, both as a working mother and as a tough boss. However, more than anything else, as architects, she and her husband who died in December 2022, were responsible for a multiplicity of impressive buildings that staged the spaces they occupied successfully and with a poetic objectivity, as well as making history in the field of federal German architecture.

*Editor's note: The villa designed by Margot und Joachim Schürmann in Cologne-Lindenthal is currently listed for sale.