Elia Zenghelis

Elia Zenghelis (Greek: Ilias Zenggelis) was a Greek architect and one of the most consequential architectural educators of the late twentieth century. He was born in Athens in 1937 and grew up through the German occupation of Greece and the civil war that followed Germany's withdrawal in 1944. In 1956 he entered the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, drawn by an issue of Architectural Record that praised the school's radical pedagogy. He completed his studies in 1961, worked for Douglas Stephen and Partners in London until 1971, and from 1963 taught at the AA, becoming a central voice for avant-garde discourse there. By the late 1960s the school was a laboratory for radical ideas; Zenghelis helped invite figures such as Coop Himmelblau and Superstudio's Adolfo Natalini, and centred his life at the school even before meeting Rem Koolhaas as a second-year student.

That encounter reshaped late twentieth-century architecture. In 1972 Zenghelis and Koolhaas, with painters Zoe Zenghelis (then Elia's wife) and Madelon Vriesendorp (Koolhaas's wife), developed Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture, a polemical London strip fiction that treated architecture as narrative, collage, and political argument. In 1975 the four formally founded the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). Early unbuilt and competition work that carried Zenghelis's imprint included Hotel Sphinx on Times Square (1975), the Dutch Parliament Extension in The Hague (1978), IBA proposals in Berlin including Lutzowstrasse (1981), Parc de la Villette in Paris (1982), and the Checkpoint Charlie housing that would be completed in 1990. Paintings made with Zoe Zenghelis to present projects such as Hotel Sphinx and Sixteen Villas on Antiparos entered MoMA's Art and Design collection. Zenghelis argued that the project image was not mere illustration but "an agent of propaganda, a proclamation." From 1980 to 1987 he was partner in charge of OMA London, and from 1982 to 1987 of OMA Athens, while the practice's metropolitan research also turned toward Mediterranean villas on Antiparos.

In 1987 he left OMA and founded Gigantes Zenghelis Architects (GZA) with AA alumna Eleni Gigantes (also Tsigantes), whom he later married. Checkpoint Charlie apartments, begun under OMA and completed in 1990 with Matthias Sauerbruch as contact architect, bridged the two practices. Among GZA's best-known built works is the Ashikita House of Youth (1996-1998) in Kumamoto, Japan, for Kumamoto ArtPolis. From about 1992 Zenghelis largely stepped back from day-to-day design to education, his declared first vocation. He held the Baukunst professorship at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf (1989-2002), taught at the Berlage Institute (1993-2010) and sat on its board from 2003, taught as guest at EPFL Lausanne (1997-1998) and ETH Zurich (1998-2000), and as professor at Accademia d'Architettura Mendrisio (2000-2007). He was professor emeritus at the University of Thessaly, taught masterclasses at The Bartlett (2012), and held Yale visiting chairs including Davenport (2013, 2015), Eero Saarinen (2017), and Norman R. Foster (2019). eKathimerini and other sources also note teaching and visiting roles spanning Columbia, Syracuse, Princeton, UCLA, Patras, and institutions in Asia, Africa, and South America. In 2000 the RIBA awarded him the Annie Spink Award for Excellence in Education.

Students who passed through his studios included Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, and David Chipperfield, among many others. Rem Koolhaas's remembrance after his death captured both the professional debt and the human tone of their early partnership: without Zenghelis's "exuberant talent," Koolhaas wrote, "OMA (as an idea) would not exist," recalling falsetto singing over a drawing board at 2 a.m. as proof that "architecture can make you happy," and calling the generosity Zenghelis invested in other people's talent "monumental." In a 2023 Kathimerini interview Zenghelis said he belonged to "the category of architects who have not built very much, and that does not make me sad," because teaching had by choice "swallowed up" the architect's role. He criticized architectural star culture's individualism, preferred Greek modernists such as Nikos Valsamakis, Aris Konstantinidis, and Takis Zenetos, and argued architecture should be taught from elementary school so children would learn to read their environment critically.

Elia Zenghelis died in Athens on August 30, 2026, at the age of 89. Major English-language obituaries (ArchDaily, Architectural Record, Archinect, METALOCUS, eKathimerini) did not make a cause of death public. Tributes followed from OMA, Yale School of Architecture, the University of Thessaly's Department of Architecture, and the wider architectural press. His legacy rests as much on pedagogy and the speculative image as on completed buildings: a teacher who treated the project as a way to invent collective life in the city.