Russian architect Ernest Gindper
Image: geni.
Building Russian Shanghai now includes a professional biography of Ernest Leopoldovich Gindper (Hindper), who arrived in Shanghai as a youth in 1918 and spent 25 fruitful years here. He joined Elliott Hazzard’s architecture studio as soon as it was founded in 1923 and stayed with the firm for 8 years. During this time, Hazzard’s most famous buildings were realized, such as the Foreign YMCA, the CUA, Strand Theatre, Brookside Apartments and Lieu Ong Kee Building, to name just a few. In 1931, Hazzard expanded his office by hiring more Russian architects, but Gindper had already moved on to join Algar & Co. He stayed with this firm for ten years, and in this time the company finished several apartment buildings in Hongkew.
Having founded his own practice in 1940, together with his Russian colleague Nicolas Emanoff, Gindper contributed to Friendship Apartments, T. Z. Woo’s residence and an art deco mansion on Wukang Road.
More details and photographs of Gindper’s buildings can be found on Building Russian Shanghai.
This was an issue of NETA - a column dedicated to the legacy of lesser-known Shanghai architects, which has already featured Gabriel Rabinovich, Wladimir Livin-Goldenstaedt, Karsten Hermann Suhr, Ilarion Tomashevsky, Hans Hajek, Boris Krivoss, Isabella Karsnitsky, Hans Berents, Marcel Guillet, Okano Shigehisa, Bright Fraser, Wm. A. Kirk, A. W. Graham-Brown, James Harry Blackstone, George Alexander Johnson, Edison Calatroni and Ernyi S. Hsieh, Rudolf Hamburger, T. Chuang (Zhuang Jun), Bela Matrai and Alexander Krenov.