Elia Zenghelis

Elia Zenghelis (Born 1937, Athens, Greece) is a Greek architect and teacher. He studied architecture at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London, completing his studies in 1961. From 1961 to 1971 he worked for architects Douglas Stephen and Partners, London, while also (from 1963) teaching at the Architectural Association under Hermann Senkowsky. Zenghelis became a prominent teacher at the school for introducing more radical avant-gardism into the curriculum. From 1971 to 1975 Zenghelis collaborated with various architects in London, Paris and New York: Georges Candilis, Michael Carapetian, Aristeides Romanos, Rem Koolhaas, O.M. Ungers and Peter Eisenman.

Zenghelis came to critical attention with the work of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), which he founded together with his wife Zoe Zenghelis and husband-and-wife Rem Koolhaas (Zenghelis' former student) and Madelon Vriesendorp.

From 1980 to 1987 Zenghelis was partner in charge of OMA London, and from 1982 to 1987 OMA Athens. Of the OMA works, Zenghelis was a central influence in the early works: Extension of the Dutch Houses of Parliament, The Hague, 1978; Lutzowstrasse, IBA Berlin, 1981; Parc de la Villette, Paris, 1982; Checkpoint Charlie housing, IBA Berlin, 1990.

Several of the paintings that Elia Zenghelis made with Zoe Zenghelis to illustrate the OMA projects - such as Hotel Sphinx (1975), and Sixteen Villas on the Island of Antiparos, Greece (1981) - are now included in the Art and Design collection of the MOMA in New York.

Zenghelis' turn to designing bourgeois summer villas in Greece in the early 1980s marked a change in the dynamics of his work: the British architectural journal Architectural Design (no. 51, 1981) noted in regards to his houses in Antiparos, that "Since Elia Zenghelis and Rem Koolhaas formally founded OMA over six years ago, their work, recently described by Bob Maxwell ‘as a series of paradoxes: reductivist yet metaphoric, polemical yet exquisite, modern, yet anti-modern’, has revealed subtle shifts of concern. This idiosyncratic evolution has now moved from Manhattanism to Mediterraneanism; their current project for a series of villas on Antiparos reflects a development of the OMA rationale skilfully crafted with Aegean traditions." This evaluation is somewhat misleading, however, in that after this work Zenghelis still worked in projects in West Berlin, especially the urban infill, part of the IBA Berlin project, in which the city set up a series of invited architectural competitions among avant-gardist architects of the time (including Aldo Rossi, Peter Eisenman and Rob Krier) to design infills on sites throughout the city. OMA designed a structure adjacent to the infamous Checkpoint Charlie site - at a time when the border control was still operating.

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