Sandy van Ginkel

Education and Early Career

Sandy Van Ginkel studied architecture at the Elckerlyc Academy of Architecture and Applied Art in Lage Vuurse, Netherlands, and sociology at the University of Utrecht. He then worked in architecture and planning offices in the Netherlands, Sweden and Ireland and had his own architectural practice in Amsterdam. This experience brought him into contact with a wide range of European modernists including J. Bakema, Cornelius van Eesteren, Sven Markelius, Aldo van Eyck and Ralph Erskine. Van Ginkel himself was aligned first with Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) and then Team X (or Team Ten), for whom he drafted the Doorn Manifesto.

Later Career

van Ginkel Associates

In 1957 van Ginkel moved to Montreal with his Canadian wife Blanche Lemco van Ginkel and established van Ginkel Associates, a multidisciplinary design and management firm. Their timing was propitious as Montreal - and Canada - was on the verge of rapid development, and Canadian planning and urban design in its infancy. (See also Urban and Regional Planning.) Among the earliest projects of the firm were the planning of Bowring Park in St. John's Newfoundland and a series of critical Montreal studies that led to the protection of the historic centre (particularly Old Montreal) in the face of inevitable development. They included the Montreal Port Study (1958-59), the Central Area Circulation Plan (1960-61), a plan for Old Montreal (1960-61), and planning and design for Expo 67(1962-67).

Subsequent work influenced the course of development across North America and Asia. This includes the design of a prototype airport terminal facility for Transport Canada (1970); an atlas of the communities of the Mackenzie (1975); a study on building in the North for Canadian Arctic Gas (1976) and the completion of a development plan for Pahang Tenggara, Malaysia (1973). Particularly notable was Movement in Midtown (1970-71), a circulation plan for Midtown Manhattan and the development of a new urban transit vehicle, dubbed the Ginkelvan (1973).

Sandy van Ginkel published widely in both professional and popular journals and lectured in various capacities to university students of architecture, planning and urban design. In 1986 he was the Thomas Jefferson Professor of Architecture at the University of Virginia. In 1991 van Ginkel designed an exhibition of the work of John C. Parkin at Academy House, Toronto. From 1989 on, he worked primarily as a sculptor.

Select Honours and Awards

In 1982, Sandy van Ginkel was appointed a fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada. In 2007 he was named a member of the Order of Canada.