Anna
Schmitz

A House with Roots

The Waldlerhaus in the Upper Palatinate-Bavarian Forest

The project A House with Roots embarked on a narrative journey that rediscovered the spatial and cultural layers of the Upper Palatinate Bavarian Forest in southeastern Germany. This journey led to the Waldlerhaus, a regional byre dwelling in which people lived with and from the forest, sharing one roof with their animals. Over time, it was shaped by its historical roots as well as by the stories and rituals passed down through generations, which brought each Waldlerhaus to life. These stories, folk tales, and rituals often narrate the mythical landscape and its legendary creatures. This intertwinement between the living environment and humans underlines its former relationship. Yet the landscape did not only inspire storytelling; it also shaped the Waldlerhaus itself. Through an understanding of the surrounding flora and environmental conditions, their influence found expression in the building’s tectonics and local craft traditions, ultimately giving the Waldlerhaus its distinctive characteristics. As the landscape has changed over the centuries, so too have its people, spaces, and stories. With these transformations, however, the Waldlerhaus and its stories are gradually disappearing from both the living and cultural landscape, raising the vital question of how this cultural knowledge can be preserved and reimagined within a contemporary context. To carry forward the knowledge embedded in this building typology and to give its stories a home, the spatial approach proposes a “House of Stories.” The project establishes a dialogue between an existing Waldlerhaus and a new architectural proposal. They communicate through construction techniques, materials, and a shared programme of storytelling and craftsmanship that preserves, remembers, and transmits stories. The programme and space actively encourage creativity, as well as the re-embodiment and creation of stories through spoken language, physical interpretation, and visual craft. This project is a personal appreciation of a vanishing cultural landscape. It follows unfamiliar paths in search of answers that create spaces that speak of imagination and invite others to imagine, where the stories of the past, present, and future can be carried forward.

A Yarn of Time

An exploration of family history and its ties to a passementerie factory, expressed through material experiments with lace-making and a video installation.

I remember walking through the grand halls of my family’s factory as a child surrounded by loud machines. A sound of productivity, energy and rhythm calling through the space. What did these big machines produce? Little laces each a unique collective of yarns representing color, design and elegance. These laces were created to decorate traditional garments, tie backs and, most importantly, to preserve the spirit of the rich European tradition of handmade lace crafted by women for centuries. Spinning the threads of time, changing fashion trends and cheaper production abroad pushed our family business to close, but also the handmade craft felt in oblivion. To honor this art, I picked up the forgotten yarn and began learning the craft of bobbin lace. With each loop of yarn, I realized the immense time and dedication required. My first lace ribbon took five hours, transforming simple yarn into a rich and unique artwork. The repetitive work led me into a place of rhythm and repetition turning my hand and head into machines mirroring the machinery of my family factory. This inspired me to pick up new threads of technology, leading me to experiment with 3D printing as a modern counterpart to traditional hand crafts. Printing the lace took the machine 10 minutes, while losing the uniqueness, imperfection and worth of handmade crafts. This project wants to keep the memory about forgotten crafts alive. Creating their worth by time, knowledge and manual work. Underlining their beauty, individualism and the richness in mistakes. I want to inspire others to feel the joy of creating something with their own hand and to appreciate the beauty of forgotten crafts, because it all just starts with a yarn.

The Lightness and the Heaviness

A design proposal for two storage houses that rival each other in size, volume, and materiality, yet belong together.

Shaped lightness or shaped heaviness are not only asking for weight, but also for proportion, regularity, form, material and color. The lightness and the heaviness is a design issue we dealt with in this project. This project expresses that heaviness seems only heavy when there is something light contrasting it. This interaction is materialized here as an enormous storehouse, which is contrariwise to a tiny sales department. The storage house is covered by an overarching, thin roof, which is reinforced by massive slices whereas the tiny sale is embossed by stacked wooden panels. You can find heaviness and lightness contrasting each other in materials, form and composition. Starting with a task about composition, which lead from a sketch made out of two lines and two squares to the final site plan. By Elena Derntl and Anna Schmitz.

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