Architect and Educator Elia Zenghelis, 89, Has Died

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Elia Zenghelis, who cofounded Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in 1975 with Rem Koolhaas, Madelon Vriesendorp, and his then wife, painter Zoe Zenghelis, has died. He was 89.

Elia Zenghelis was born in Athens in 1937 and grew up in Greece during the German occupation and the civil war that followed Germany’s withdrawal in 1944. He entered the Architectural Association (AA) in London as a student in 1956, inspired to attend the school by an issue of Architectural Record that extolled its radical pedagogy. He started teaching there in 1963, a couple of years after graduating.

Checkpoint Charlie Apartments, Berlin. Photo Gunnar Klack, Wikimedia Commons

Zenghelis became a prominent instructor at the AA, and it was there that he met Koolhaas, a student of his. Koolhaas, who had already spent some time as a journalist by then, was only seven years his junior. They began working together and formed OMA with their respective artist wives. An early project of the firm was Zenghelis’s Hotel Sphinx on Times Square, which proposed an urban hotel as a model for mass housing and was included in Koolhaas’s book Delirious New York. “New York in those days was not all gentrified, and certain streets were dangerous,” Zenghelis explained in a 2013 interview with LOG. “I started thinking that the so-called “existenzminimum” should be that of a luxury hotel. I extended that to the idea that a luxury hotel offers the possibility of an alternative way of living…life in a mix of apartments and houses, in a concentrated and congested urban condition, can be very exciting.” Other unrealized OMA projects at the time included the Dutch Parliament Extension (1978) and the Parc de la Villette in Paris (1982). Several of the paintings that Elia and Zoe Zenghelis collaborated on to illustrate OMA projects, including for Hotel Sphinx, are now included in the Art and Design collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “The image has always played an important ideological role,” Elia said. “The image of a project, before a project is even realized, is an agent of propaganda, a proclamation.”

After leaving OMA in 1987, Elia went into partnership with architect Eleni Gigantes, also an AA alum, whom he later married, in the office Gigantes Zenghelis Architects. Their first project together, started at OMA, was the Checkpoint Charlie Apartments in Berlin, completed in 1990. Among the firm’s most significant completed works was the wavy-roofed Ashikita House of Youth (1998) in Kumamoto, Japan. But Zenghelis increasingly stepped back from active design to focus on education, teaching at schools across Europe and the United States including the Berlage Institute and the Yale School of Architecture.

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