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Blanche Lemco van Ginkel

Over much of the past century, Blanche Lemco van Ginkel has distinguished herself as an enduring force in architectural culture.

Born in 1923 in London, England, Blanche moved with her family to Montreal in her early teens. She began architectural studies at McGill University, one of the first females admitted to the school, and received her degree in 1945. After stints working in municipal planning in Windsor and Regina, she travelled overseas to work with Le Corbusier—most famously on the rooftop terrace of the Unité d’habitation in Marseilles, including the design of its iconic concrete ventilator stacks.

On returning to North America, she studied city planning at Harvard University, graduating in 1950. In 1953, while attending the CIAM conference in Aix-en-Provence, she met architect Sandy van Ginkel, becoming his life partner and co-founding van Ginkel Associates with him four years later. Their skills proved to be highly symbiotic. Blanche worked as an equal partner with Sandy on a number of significant design projects, including Bowring Park in St John’s, Newfoundland. In the early 1960s, they helped save Old Montreal by persuading the municipal and provincial governments not to build waterfront freeway through the historic district.

Pedagogy is yet another major pillar of Blanche Lemko van Ginkel’s career. From 1951 to 1957, while practising architecture in Philadelphia, she began teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. In the ensuing years, she taught at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. When she returned to Montreal, she developed the first courses in urban design at the Université de Montréal in the 1960s and at McGill in the 1970s. In 1977, she became the Dean of the University of Toronto School of Architecture (now the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design). The first female to head the program, she inspired a generation of students to focus on underserved subjects in architectural and urban design, including infrastructure and mobility systems. 

Publish Date : 2020/Nov/17
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