Anke van Hal finished Selective High School (technical studies) in 1983 in Ridderkerk and subsequently studied Architecture at the Delft University of Technology. In 1989 she graduated with honors at the Department of Architecture.
For four years, she worked for the municipality of Delft in the capacity of Employee Sustainable Building, and was as such responsible for the sustainable building policy of the municipality and involved in a number of demonstration projects. From 1993 to 1996 she worked as a senior consultant for the environmental research and design firm BOOM in Delft. In this capacity too, she was closely involved in different demonstration projects in the field of sustainable building. Besides this, the focus of her attention was mainly on the transfer of information and sustainable building policy. During this period she was also involved in the implementation of environmental education in the Architecture Faculty of the TUDelft.
From 1996 - 2000 she worked at the Faculty of Architecture of the Delft University of Technology. Interrupted by four months of maternity leave, she conducted her doctoral research for a period of four years. In October 2000 she obtained her doctorate on a thesis titled ‘Beyond the demonstration project, the diffusion of environmental innovations in housing’.
During her studies she combined her technical work with journalistic activities. Having worked as an editor during her studies for the TUDelft journal Delta, she continued to publish articles on a freelance basis. In the technical journal Building (Bouw), she was responsible for the section on sustainable building. She was also the chief editor for the journal Construction Physics (Bouwfysica) of the Flemish-Dutch Association for Construction Physics. In 1995 she and a number of colleagues started the technical journal Sustainable Building (Duurzaam Bouwen). Until September 2005 she was chief editor of this journal, which was later named Pure Building (Puur Bouwen). She was the chief editor of the biannual consumer magazine Pure Living (Puur Wonen) and co-initiator/organizer of the annual Pure Living Relay (Puur Wonen Estafette). She worked as an editor at the internationally oriented English technical journal Sustainable Building. Presently, she writes for a number of specialist and consumer journals and, together with the former editorial staff of the magazine Pure Building, the publisher and the chief editor of the journal P+ (people, planet, profit), is setting up a new journal on the subject of socially responsible entrepreneurship in the building industry. She also writes columns in the Dutch Government Gazette (Staatscourant).
In September 2000 Anke van Hal started her agency that aims to bridge the gap between building and consumers. The main goal of this firm is to use market demand to promote environmentally friendly and healthy building and housing products. From September 2000 to July 2001 she was posted to the Steering Committee for Public Housing and Environment (Stuurgroep Volkshuisvesting en Milieu - SEV) and was responsible for the experimental program ‘sustainable and healthy building and living’. She subsequently left for the East coast of the United States to conduct research into the market opportunities for sustainable house-building, also commissioned by SEV. Since her return in the summer of 2002, she has worked for government agencies (both municipal and federal), educational and research institutes, publishers, architects, project developers, realtors, housing associations, congress organizations and private customers. Often in close consultation with other consulting firms.
Anke van Hal is a researcher/teacher at the Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Architecture and senior-researcher at Nyenrode Business Universiteit at the Center for Sustainability. She was member of the program committee Environment & Technology (Milieu & Technologie), a promotion program for SME by Novem/Senter, and is member of the working group 'regulations 'from The Platform Energy Transition in the Building Environment (PeGO) and of the International Initiative for a Sustainable Built Environment (iiSBE). She is member of several juries and author of several books and articles.
