Miriam Baake †

Miriam joined schneider+schumacher in October 2000. She was involved with many of the office’s important projects, some of which, thanks to Miriam’s contribution have become key schneider+schumacher buildings.

In the early days of her office career, Miriam worked for one of schneider+schumacher’s first clients, Michael Loulakis, among other things, work on designing the high-rise building on Schwedlerstrasse. She later designed the Nexxus project together with Till Schneider – a project that unfortunately never got built. In 2007 she began her work as project manager on the refurbishment and extension to the Städel, which she implemented together with Kai Otto and Hans Eschmann.

From 2012 onwards, Miriam was the lead project architect for the Dom-Römer, a project that was to become of central importance for our office and also for the city of Frankfurt. She organised the planning and supervision of the 20 architects whose award-winning competition designs were to be implemented.

Another key Frankfurt project is the Steigenberger IntercityHotel at the main railway station, a building that closed a long-standing gap in the cityscape. Here too, Miriam was in charge of planning. Other projects in which she was involved were the HQS in Göttingen, the Quayside project in Offenbach, and the Collinis in Mannheim.

Miriam spent her entire professional life at schneider+schumacher and we worked together very happily, trustingly and productively during the entire time. As Till Schneider put it: “Without her insistence on bringing order to even the most confusing structures, we would have had a hard time.” This sums up a number of things that were important to Miriam: never give, up be persistent and always create order, be it in her own team or on the specialist planner and client side. She was reliability personified and for this reason, and because of her equanimity, as well as her expertise, she was highly valued by clients, building supervisors and in the office.

With her demand for perfection, she sometimes gave herself a hard time, compared with the tendency of those around her not to take things quite so seriously. However, it was precisely these differences that led to an ideal situation of ‘give and take’ and mutual appreciation. In addition to her perseverance in legal and economic aspects of her work, she was also tenacious in creative matters. Here too, she was always pushing for a better solution.

Miriam was a “proper” architect.

She patiently introduced many young colleagues to the reality of architecture and planning, always setting high standards. There are many of us who owe her a great deal.

Just a few weeks ago, Miriam told us about the ongoing search for the causes of her illness. It seems that death caught her just as unprepared as it did her daughter Ava, her husband Denis, and us too.

Even though more than two years have passed since her last day in the office, and many new young colleagues have joined us in the interim who did not have the opportunity to get to know Miriam, she is still one of us; she was always one of the team, had a permanent place in the ensemble, and as such she will continue to play her part in our memories.