Architecture Maryann Schicketanz

The balance between the natural and the built environment is the chief theme that architects confront in practicing their art. But for some, their talents in conceiving landscape as space and architecture as a built metaphor of nature take their designs to the next level. Maryann Schicketanz is such an architect. At heart, she is a designer of natural and human-made landscapes with work that consistently, wondrously merges that line.

 

Experiencing her thought-out settings coaxes the user into a dimension that is both soothing and exciting. Nature is the constant companion for all who inhabit her architecture. It could be a vista, a narrow sightline between indoor spaces looking out, an outdoor deck, a rooftop, or some other condition that entails the creative handling of the inside and the outside. This nurturing connection of all areas of the house to the beauty of the site reverberates as the basis of the character that she gives to her projects.

 

Her convictions are clear: “Space has a profound impact on our wellbeing,” she remarks. The aesthetic of spaces we grow up in, live in, and work in shapes our brains and our emotional development. How aesthetics does this is at the forefront of her design philosophy. Through both intuition and research-based findings, she has seen that the built environment around us plays a decisive role in who we become. She comments: “When I reflect on my upbringing, I can say that I had the good fortune of spending most of my time in beautiful spaces.”

 

An assertive designer with a soft touch, Maryann’s biography is as singular as her work. Born in Neumarkt Kallham, Austria, she grew up in her grandmother’s house until age 6. That small town organized around a baroque square imprinted in her how architecture and urban design could affect people’s lives. She remembers: “It was really a paradise to grow up in.” However, her parents moved to a bigger town, Linz. Maryann had to come to terms with the less felicitous and qualitative limits of post-war suburbia. It was a small house with little relationship to the outdoors and the neighbors. She was absorbing the relationship between architecture, landscape, and being. Rejecting what she could of that setting, she took refuge in painting and dance well into her adolescence.

 

Architecture came as a late passion in her life, and by accident. Her first love was dance until a horse-back fall cut short her aspirations to become a professional dancer. Regardless, she went ahead with her plan for a year in India to learn Kathak, one of the Indian classical dance forms. In the mid-seventies, she traveled to the subcontinent, where she stumbled across the landmarks of late Modern Architecture. She visited Chandigarh, the capital of Punjab, much of which was designed by the Swiss-French master Le Corbusier and who authored many of the buildings now part of the UNESCO heritage. She also saw the work of American architect Louis Kahn in Ahmadabad. Fate gave her an even more memorable indoctrination when she was invited to stay in one of the houses designed by Corbusier. She loved everything about that space.

 

She set her mind: Architecture was her call. After a year at the technical University of Vienna, she transferred to the University of Stuttgart to earn her master’s degree. The hard-core engineering training gave her a strong technical basis, but her yearning for the romance of Chandigarh or Ahmadabad lingered. And she held a few other influences in mind. The great Austrians (the generation of Loos and Holzmeister and Roland Rainer), as well as their students (Peichl, Hollein, and Holzbauer), inspired first principles she would incorporate into her design voice.

 

After practicing as an architect for six years in Tübingen, Germany, she moved with her husband and two small children to California. Professionally she was starting over but now surrounded by the beautiful landscape of Monterey Bay that boosted in her a resolve to design architecture that respects its unique setting. From then on, Maryann embarked on a journey to contribute in meaningful ways to the preservation and enrichment of the land through architecture. After being in partnership with Rob Carver for 25 years, in 2012, she established Studio Schicketanz. She gathered a small, strong, cohesive group of inspired designers invested technically and emotionally in realizing architecture with high quality detailing. Studio Schicketanz generates designs highly acclaimed by both professionals and the general public. 

 

Since going solo, the full maturity of Maryann’s design signature has blossomed, nourished by her passion for dance. Goethe famously said that architecture is frozen music. Maryann’s work expresses an equivalent — architecture is frozen dance. For her, the architectural experience is an extension of choreographic choices. Harmony, rhythm, dynamism in configurations inform layouts, sequences, massing, and the dwelling of the architecture. Her design aesthetic becomes a bodily experience.

 

Studio Schicketanz focuses on two main practice areas. One focus is singular structures in a vast landscape. Given Maryann’s commitment to the natural character of the land, she designs a project that is of the site, that grows out of it. She favors the integration of architecture of presence as opposed to the relentless quest for the iconic for its own sake. The sites are already commanding. The architecture, she holds, is the proper homage to their beauty. In this respect, Carmel Valley Residence is an exemplary essay of design translating in built form a reading of the natural setting to meet the client’s brief. A tall glass pavilion resting on a gentle topography graced with lush vegetation lets the occupants inhabit nature in full display of its arresting magnificence throughout the year.

 

The second focus of Studio Schicketanz is the analysis of existing structures. When is it better to demolish and rebuild versus renovate or rehabilitate? Re-imagining an existing building is its own art form. And some of these designs are highly charged with the signature of their original architects. To intervene on them is a form of design surgery, and Maryann Schicketanz is a master. Her judgment and invisible hand respect the essence of a building often compromised in its integrity by insensitive alterations and extend its life to current living demands. Some of her achievements in this arena are the design interventions on the Stone House by William Wurster, originally commissioned by famed architectural photographer Morley Baer, the Philip Johnson/David Whitney/Weiss Residence designed by Kipp Stewart, the Weekly, The Press Club by MLTW, the designers of Sea Ranch, and many others.

 

The numerous projects past, on the boards, and close to completion grow out of Maryann’s belief that architecture makes our lives fundamentally better. The seductive forms of the Weiss Residence express this, where the architecture emerges from the landscape. The solidity of the masonry walls and the lightness of the glazed surface are carefully positioned within the site characteristics to maximize vistas and make the garden the chief living experience. By tackling the ever-present theme of indoor and outdoor in always imaginative ways, Maryann Schicketanz reminds us through her architecture that we belong to nature. And that is our setting.

 

Pierluigi Serraino, AIA, is an architect, author, and educator. He holds multiple professional and research degrees in architecture from Italy and the United States and has over 15 years of work experience as a design architect. Prior to opening his independent design practice, Pierluigi worked on a variety of residential and institutional projects in the United States and overseas at Mark Mack Architects; Skidmore, Owings & Merrill; and Anshen+Allen.

As an educator, Pierluigi has lectured on postwar American architecture, California modernism, architectural photography, changes in architectural practice, and digital design. His work and writing have been published in journals such as Architectural Record, Architecture California, the Journal of Architectural Education, and Architectural Design (UK). He has authored four books, among them The Creative Architect: Inside the Great Midcentury Personality Study, Modernism Rediscovered and NorCalMod: Icons of Northern California Modernism, and numerous essays.