Über De Zwarte Hond
At De Zwarte Hond, an architecture, urban planning and strategy firm with around 130 employees in three offices (Groningen, Rotterdam, Cologne and Berlin), Ellen Schindler is managing partner and, as managing director, responsible for the Berlin office. Schindler’s guiding principle is to ‘enable development’, whether of employees, projects, the office or the field of architecture and urban planning in general.
About Ellen Schindler
Ellen Schindler is the initiator and founder of the YOU Foundation (Young Optimistic Urbanists). The foundation’s goal is to promote young people’s personal responsibility for their urban living environment through multi-layered educational projects in the form of a book and/or manifestations. This resulted in a visual story, the graphic novel METRO 010, which will not only be available in bookshops from November 2022 and in English from August 2023, but was also distributed as a free school edition in May 2023. Already, 20,000 seventh-graders (11/12-year-olds) in Rotterdam received the book on their first day of secondary school – at a time when they are spreading their wings, expanding their reach and beginning to explore the city. Their city!
From mid-November 2026, there will also be a graphic novel in Groningen, which will again be distributed free of charge to schoolchildren. This edition is currently being developed in collaboration with 20 Groningen illustrators, authors, historians and cultural institutions in Groningen.
Ellen Schindler was previously a partner and managing director at Kossmann.dejong Exhibition Architects. With her strategic vision, organisational talent and ability to connect people, she developed Kossmann.dejong from a national design firm into an award-winning international studio with projects around the world, operating in 15 countries and on three continents.
She also developed a series of lectures entitled Business your Design on the topics of entrepreneurship, project management and business development, which she taught at the Royal Academy of Art (The Hague) and the Design Academy (Eindhoven).
Ellen Schindler was a board member of the Council for Culture, an advisory body to the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. She was chair of the board of the dance company Conny Janssen Danst and a board member of Cultuur Concreet, an organisation that supports local cultural initiatives in Rotterdam’s neighbourhoods.