Elia Zenghelis, with the fifth generation of the Berlage students, 1995. Courtesy of the author.
In a statement shared with Dezeen, Koolhaas said that OMA would not exist “without his exuberant talent.” Rem continued, saying: “The generosity he invested—his entire life—in other people’s talent is monumental. Our connection at a crucial moment generated the insights and energy to launch our project.”1
Many architectural web pages recently highlight key moments in his life: Elia Zenghelis was born in Athens in 1937. He began his career in architecture after graduating from the Architectural Association (AA) in London in 1961. Soon after, he joined Douglas Stephen and Partners, where he worked until 1971 while also teaching at the AA. Among others, he worked with Kenneth Frampton in this office. The two have been friends for life.
Zenghelis taught at the AA until 1987. Rem Koolhaas was his student, and later they taught together in the Diploma Unit. Following his time at the AA, he succeeded James Stirling as Baukunst Professor at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf in 1989—a position he held until 2002. He also taught at Berlage Institute, Yale, EPFL, and ETH Zurich, amongst other leading architecture schools. In 2000, he received RIBA’s Annie Spink Award for Excellence in Education.
As an architect, he was best known as a cofounder of OMA, which he established in 1975 with Rem Koolhaas, Madelon Vriesendorp, and Zoe Zenghelis. Elia led the London office and later the Athens branch. Rem moved to Rotterdam, and their collaboration was soon terminated. Rem and Elia did not meet again until 1996, when they spoke during Claudia Dias’s thesis defense at the Berlage. With great persistence, she persuaded Rem to be her thesis tutor.
This would be the shortest story about Elia to appear after his death. Iker asked me to write more, so I will focus mainly on the period from 1993 to 2020, when Elia worked at Berlage as a thesis mentor. That is a 17-year relationship between Elia Zenghelis and the Institute, and I was incredibly privileged to spend most of his teaching time with him in Amsterdam and later in Rotterdam.
Elia first came to the Berlage in 1993 for an Art and Architecture Masterclass led by Steven Holl, alongside other invited architects, including Wiel Arets, Eleni Gigantes, and Viktor Mani. The masterclass was a key element of the Berlage Institute’s curriculum, in which both enrolled students and external participants worked on a weekly assignment set by the invited architect.
Elia’s contributions to the discussions throughout that week were so striking that Herman [Hertzberger], together with Kenneth Frampton, concluded that the Institute would greatly benefit from having him permanently involved in the school’s teaching. At the time, the concept for the second-year final project had not yet been clearly defined, and Elia proved to be the ideal person to guide students through their individual projects during that second year of study. Even today, we see countless messages on social media from many of Elia’s former students, expressing deep gratitude for the opportunity to learn from him at the Berlage Institute.
Wiel Arets became dean after Hertzberger and regarded Elia as the founder of OMA and the architect of Check Point Charlie, but mostly as a professor who led an Exodus project at the Architectural Association with Rem as a student. Wiel believed in individual thesis development, and Elia was the best fit for this. However, as the number of students increased, three additional teachers began supervising second-year theses: Raoul Bunschote, Winy Mass, and Bart Lotsma. I was the Course Director at the time and participated in each module’s presentations, as well as in joint presentations. Despite differences in the teachers’ personalities and ideologies, Elia was always the authority and voice of “reason,” so every discussion focused primarily on students’ well-being and project development.
If we were to discuss which architecture school or office was most productive in educating the new avant-garde architects, and who trained these young people, it would certainly be Rem Koolhaas at the Rotterdam OMA office and Elia Zenghelis at Berlage. Elia metaphorically described her role at Berlage as that of a midwife: someone who helps students who are already pregnant and need to give birth. Elia likely collaborated with more than 100 students on individual theses. One can read powerful short obituaries by some of these students, which mention how fundamentally important Elia was as a teacher and as a person in their professional and personal development.
Looking back on his professional path, he will also say: “I haven’t built much, and I don’t regret it. I chose teaching—students over clients.” I remembered another of Elia’s remarks from our conversation about the difference between us teachers and our graduate students. Elia answered again in metaphor: “You know, Vedran, they will grow up, and you and I will remain children forever.”
At Berlage, Elia often worked on individual student theses and led research-based design studios within the conceptual frameworks of “Making the City” and later “Capital Cities.”
In 2000, Edi Rama, the newly elected mayor of Tirana, invited Elia to serve on the jury for the central city axis’s urban design. Edi and Elia immediately clicked, and at the next meeting with Edi and the Dutch ambassador in Albania, we agreed to establish the Research Design Studio Tirana Metropolis.
Elia and Pier Vitorio Aurelli led the studio with a group of exceptionally high-caliber, enthusiastic students. The studio culminated in the publication Tirana Metropolis, which, like the studio, was financed by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and, at the time, recognized Edi Rama as a new democratic politician in the Balkans. Tirana Metropolis showcased students’ individual work on the city’s urban development, which impressed Edi and urban planners in Tirana and was later used to create the city’s regulatory plan. Edi then invited many students from that group to design new residential buildings and complexes, including Pier Paolo Tamburelli, Rosana Atena, and Martin Sobota. In addition, Winy Mass and Reiner de Graaf from Berlage, teachers and alumni of the first generation of students, participated in the city’s construction.
During my tenure as Director of the Berlage Institute, Elia worked with Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tatara within the Capital City research program. Elia and I established a lecture program, “Fabrication of Ideology and Architectural Education,” inviting architects who shaped architectural discourse over the past half-century. It combined a public lecture with a seminar for our students. Andrea Branzi, Peter Eisenman, Leon Krier, Jim Venturi, Eyal Weisman, and Alejandro Zaera Polo gave lectures in the seminar, including Elia and me.
Here is a quote from Elia’s lecture: “For me, architecture and architectural education are inextricably linked as one thing. I think that one needs to be educated continuously; we all do. In a way, architecture is not necessarily, or only, the product of a finished building; it is much bigger than that. It is an idea about culture and an idea about civilization, and it is a branch of that most important human trajectory in history, which is civilization.”
I have continued to believe in Elia’s wisdom.
