Machoninová trained at the Czech Technical University in Prague, graduating in 1952, having met her future husband and lifelong professional partner Vladimír Machonin as a student there; they married in 1948 and ran a joint practice for the rest of his career. Their major commissions, won together in public competitions during the 1960s, share a hexagonal or crystalline geometry built up from a single repeating module — the Hotel Thermal at Karlovy Vary, the Czechoslovak embassy in East Berlin, and Kotva, Prague's largest department store — realised through the 1970s in board-formed concrete and metal cladding. After Machonin's death in 1990 she continued designing on her own into old age, remaining, past her ninety-seventh birthday, one of the last surviving architects of Czechoslovak Brutalism.
