Elia Zenghelis Helped Build OMA. His Bigger Legacy May Be the Architects He Taught

Elia Zenghelis is often introduced as one of the four people who founded OMA. That is true, but it only tells part of the story. His influence reached much further through the architects he taught, the ideas he tested in classrooms, and the way he treated drawings and images as tools for thinking about cities.

Zenghelis died on August 30, 2026, at the age of 89. Born in Athens in 1937, he moved to London to study at the Architectural Association, graduating in 1961. He began teaching there in 1963, and the school soon became one of the main places where his ideas took shape.

A teacher before he became a famous name

At the AA, Zenghelis met Rem Koolhaas, then one of his students. In 1975 they founded the Office for Metropolitan Architecture with Madelon Vriesendorp and Zoe Zenghelis. The practice would later become one of the most influential architecture offices in the world.

But Zenghelis never built his reputation around office work alone. Teaching stayed central to his career. He later taught at schools across Europe and the United States, including the Berlage Institute and Yale. In 2000, the Royal Institute of British Architects gave him the Annie Spink Award for Excellence in Education.

Early OMA was built around ideas, not just buildings

Many of OMA’s early projects were never built, but they mattered because they tested new ways of thinking about dense cities, housing, public life and large-scale urban programs.

One example was Hotel Sphinx, a proposal by Zenghelis for Times Square. Instead of treating the hotel as a temporary place to sleep, the project imagined it as a model for a more intense urban way of living. Drawings and paintings were not just illustrations. They were part of the argument.

Zenghelis once described the image of a project as something that could act before the building existed. That idea became important to OMA’s early identity: architecture could be discussed, challenged and circulated through images long before construction began.

That connection between buildings and visual culture still runs through OMA’s work today. ARCHCOD has recently covered OMA’s interventions at the Edo-Tokyo Museum and its addition to New York’s New Museum.

From OMA to a quieter practice

Zenghelis left OMA in 1987 and later worked with architect Eleni Gigantes through Gigantes Zenghelis Architects. Their projects included the Checkpoint Charlie Apartments in Berlin, completed in 1990, and the Ashikita House of Youth in Kumamoto, Japan, completed in 1998.

Over time, however, Zenghelis became better known for teaching than for producing a large catalogue of buildings. That is what makes his legacy unusual. His impact is spread across other people’s work as much as his own.

Why his legacy still matters

Architecture often celebrates the person whose name appears on a building. Zenghelis shows another kind of influence. A teacher can shape the way hundreds of architects see cities, images, housing and public space without leaving a skyline full of signature projects.

For readers outside architecture, that may be the simplest way to understand his importance. He helped create OMA, but he also helped create the culture that made a new generation of architects think differently.

More about ARCHCOD and its approach to architecture, design and visual culture can be found on the About ARCHCOD page.

Source material: Architectural Record, OMA and published biographical records. Editorial review: ARCHCOD Editorial Team.