This is the eighth post in a series on the fiftieth anniversary of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, edited by Mark Stoller.

Sitting among materials like photocopied transcriptions of parts of the formal hearings of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry (MVPI) in the Montreal-based modernist architecture, design, and urban planning firm Van Ginkel Associates Limited (VGA) fonds are notes in preparation for testimony in Phase IV of the Inquiry (Figure 1). The notes offer a rationale for VGA’s role in the proposed Arctic Gas line, citing two of VGA’s past projects: the preservation of Old Montreal, to which several buildings were under threat from expressway development, and VGA’s work as part of the Province of Manitoba’s plans to relocate of the South Indian Lake community, now O-Pipon-Na-Piwin Cree Nation (ᐅᐱᐴᓇᐱᐏᐣ), which was to be flooded by Manitoba Hydro as part of the Churchill River Diversion.

H.P. Daniel (Harmen Peter Daniel) van Ginkel, recipient John J. Marshall, correspondence writer. Covering letter and list of questions prepared by John J. Marshall of Mcleod Dixon Barristers and Solicitors for Sandy van Ginkel, with hand-writtten revisions and answers to two questions, 1975. ARCH278632. Van Ginkel Associates fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture. Gift of H.P. Daniel and Blanche Lemco van Ginkel © CCA

VGA’s work in Montreal and Manitoba, as well as its submissions to the MVPI, represent what I’ve described in my work on the South Indian Lake relocation project as a dialectic of preservation and progress, wherein the impersonal forces of modernity are in some instances necessarily halted (preservation) and in other cases self-propelling (“progress”). VGA was hired by Canadian Arctic Gas Pipeline Limited (CAGPL) in May of 1974 to produce socio-economic studies of the proposed pipeline, conduct aerial mapping and surveying (see Figures 2 and 3), plan out construction logistics (Figure 4), and more. VGA’s work culminated in a report, Communities of the Mackenzie: Effects of the Hydrocarbon Industry; a two-volume atlas of northern building strategies across the Arctic and subarctic titled Building in the North; as well a manual on pipeline construction logistics.¹ VGA, however, was never called upon to testify and, in my view, have been overlooked in what is a well-studied historical episode of Canadian infrastructural history.²

Communities of the Mackenzie : effects of the hydrocarbon industry. Prepared by Van Ginkel Associates Ltd. for Canadian Arctic Gas Study Limited [and others]. [Calgary?] : The Company, 1975. 131 leaves, [4] folded leaves of plates : illustrations (some color), maps ; 28 cm pp.6-7. NA44.V2175.A35 1975

Van Ginkel Associates Ltd., Topographic maps, ink on translucent plastic film 98,3 × 116,6 cm ARCH291321. Van Ginkel Associates fonds Canadian Centre for Architecture. Gift of H.P. Daniel and Blanche Lemco van Ginkel.

While not well-known outside of niche circles in architecture and planning history, Blanche and H. P. Daniel “Sandy” van Ginkel had an outsized impact on the history of architectural modernism.³  The two met while members of Team 10, a group of modernist architects who assembled in the 1950s during a meeting of the International Congresses of Modern Architecture to challenge dominant positions the organization put forward. Blanche attended McGill’s School of Architecture, and then studied city planning at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Early in her career, Blanche designed the rooftop education building of Unité d’habitation in Marseille while working at Atelier Le Corbusier, and is credited with designing the concrete ventilation shafts that have become a synecdoche for the building (Figure 5). She later held positions at the University of Pennsylvania and at Harvard before returning to Montreal, where she and Sandy founded VGA. Alongside their preservationist work in Old Montreal and Mount Royal, Expo-67 was a touchstone intervention for the van Ginkels. Sandy was in charge of the Master Plan, Blanche the theme, and both were involved in recruiting Moshe Safdie, a former McGill student and intern for their practice whose student thesis became the blueprint for Expo’s housing pavilion, Habitat 67, which is now enshrined in modernist architectural history.⁴

Throughout Communities of the Mackenzie is an insistence on the universal economic prospects and benefits of the pipeline as a harbinger of a prosperous wage-labour economy in the North. “Jobs and income are the only solution for poverty,” the report concludes assuredly, and “improved opportunities to gain needed income will reduce anti-social behaviour and so improve the social circumstances in the study area.”⁵ These speculative claims offered as fact serve a self-fulfilling function that undermined already existing land-based economic relations in the North – the very relations that the Inquiry placed at the centre of its investigation. 

Van Ginkel Associates Ltd. Conceptual map for Building in the North & Mackenzie Pipeline circa 1974-1976. Reprographic, copy with collage. ARCH278692. Van Ginkel Associates fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture. Gift of H.P. Daniel and Blanche Lemco van Ginkel © CCA

While the report champions the pipeline, as the Inquiry moved forward, the relationship between VGA and CAGPL soured. During my time working through materials in the van Ginkel fonds, palpable, percolating resentment and disillusionment with the client’s aims and views surfaced, all of which was exacerbated by CAGPL’s plans for construction staging areas and its lack of planning surrounding temporary and permanent housing of workers. The lack of attention to the impacts of construction beyond the pipeline itself caused friction. A draft of a letter from Sandy outlines his reservations, which concern VGA’s “position as witnesses for the Berger hearings and the lack of preparedness to accept responsibilities of the building program that must be met both prior and during pipeline construction.” “We regret to state that van Ginkel Associates,” Sandy continued,

“We have started this letter with pointing to the deep involvement and our commitment to this project,” Sandy reiterated while closing the letter with the following words: “The above area is an area of our competence and a failure on the part of Arctic Gas to meet these requirements is equally our failure.”⁶ 

Much has been written on the MVPI in terms of environmental regulation, on the one hand, and Indigenous self-determination on the other. VGA’s work for CAGPL reveals the contours of a transition that, if built, the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline would help to trigger: namely, a transition to wage-labour-based industrial capitalism in the North. In Red Skin, White Masks, Yellowknives Dene political theorist Glen Coulthard recognizes this intent in his treatment of primitive or original accumulation as an ongoing rather than an historically fixed process.⁷ For Coulthard, promises of proletarianization underwrite realities of dispossession, which structures Indigenous people’s objective relations to capital accumulation more plainly than proletarianization. VGA, in a sense, was an agent of this transition that never truly came to be, as Communities of the Mackenzie quite transparently argues for.

As capital begets capital, so, too, do pipelines beget pipelines. This inertial truism is a consequence of “energy deepening,” a term economists coined to describe the historical tendency of capital to require increasing throughputs of energy, generally at the expense of labour, that has been expanded and re-articulated in the energy humanities by thinkers like Jeff Diamanti.⁸ These conditions of energy deepening haunted the Inquiry. Martin O’Malley the Globe and Mail reporter who covered the Inquiry, makes this clear when he observes that “The judge keeps repeating that the inquiry is about more than a gas pipeline” since “If it is approved, it will be ‘looped’ within five years, which really means a second pipeline.”⁹ As the dialectic of preservation and progress unfolds, the motive forces of modernity are presented as self-propelling by both supporters and opponents, yet requires architects, both literally and figuratively, to build, maintain, and reproduce the material conditions of a distinctly capitalist modernity. VGA was an architect of the failed transition that the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline represented and the Inquiry provided the setting in which these motive forces of capitalist modernity were stalled.

Featured image: Topographic maps, Van Ginkel Associates fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Gift of H.P. Daniel and Blanche Lemco van Ginkel, ARCH291321.

Notes

1. Van Ginkel Associates Ltd. Building in the North & Mackenzie Pipeline (Calgary: Canadian Arctic Gas Pipeline Limited), 1976. Van Ginkel Associates Ltd., Communities of the Mackenzie: Effects of the Hydrocarbon Industry (Toronto : Canadian Arctic Gas Pipeline Limited), 1975. ↩︎
2. My first exposure to VGA and the firm’s work with Arctic Gas was as one of the features in the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s 2016-2017 exhibition It’s All Happening So Fast: A Counter-History of the Modern Canadian Environment, curated by Mirko Zardini.  ↩︎
3. For further information on the Van Ginkels, see Margaret Emily Hodges, “Blanche Lemco van Ginkel and HP Daniel van Ginkel: Urban Planning” Unpublished doctoral dissertation, McGill University, 2004; Elizabeth Pagliacolo, “An Ode to Blanche Lemco van Ginkel,” Azure, 28 October 2022. Available at: https://www.azuremagazine.com/article/blanche-lemco-van-ginkel-obituary-memorial/ ↩︎
4. Moshe Sadie’s thesis can be viewed here: https://web.archive.org/web/20190202044228/https:/cac.mcgill.ca/moshesafdie/fullrecord.php?ID=10815&d=1. For more information on Habitat ’67, see: https://www.safdiearchitects.com/projects/habitat-67 ↩︎
5. Zardini, It’s All Happening So Fast, 72-3. ↩︎
6. Draft letter from Sandy Van Ginkel to Verne Horte, January 6, 1976. Container 27-1989-082 T, Folder 27-A68-34. Van Ginkel fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture Collection, ARCH254013.  ↩︎
7. Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 59-60. ↩︎
8. Jeff M. Diamanti, “Energyscapes, Architecture, and the Expanded Field of Postindustrial Philosophy,” Postmodern Culture 26, no. 2 (2016), https://doi.org/10.1353/pmc.2016.0006. ↩︎
9. Martin O’Malley, The Past and Future Land: An Account of the Berger Inquiry Into the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline (Toronto, ON: P. Martin Associates, 1976), 13. ↩︎

The following two tabs change content below.

• Bio
• Latest Posts

Jordan B. Kinder

Jordan B. Kinder is a media studies and environmental humanities scholar from what is now called northern British Columbia. He is a citizen of the Métis Nation of Alberta, and is currently an Assistant Professor in Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. In Fall 2025, he will be an Assistant Professor in Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. His current book project studies mediations of the unbuilt Mackenzie Valley Pipelines.

Latest posts by Jordan B. Kinder (see all)

• Architects of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline - July 9, 2025