Elia Zenghelis, the Sultan of Oma

The figure of Elia Zenghelis, who passed away on 30 August, has always been shrouded in mystery, perhaps because he was Rem Koolhaas’s first mentor – a circumstance that cast him into the shadows but also elevated him to the status of an architectural legend, as had previously been the case with L’Eplattenier and Le Corbusier. Zenghelis’s at times childlike shyness, the scarcity of his built works, the almost total absence of texts written by him or about him, as well as of photographs of him – unlike his pupil – have fuelled the messianic aura associated with his name; just like the prophet Elijah, he might have appeared suddenly in any corner of the world. He was born in Athens in 1937, the son of an engineer who, because of the war and then the subsequent military regime, had moved to Johannesburg in South Africa. As a teenager, he was deeply affected by a flight that offered glimpses of contrasting landscapes – from desert to jungle, from vast green valleys to boundless, sun-baked megacities. Ever since he was a child, he had enjoyed drawing imaginary cities, spending the rest of his life pondering how these might come together and take shape without worrying too much about their impracticality – on closer inspection, this was his defining characteristic. He studied at the Architectural Association in London, as did other South Africans (Denise and Robert Scott Brown, and Robert Middleton, who also passed away recently), as well as Greek and Armenian refugees such as Michael Carapetian.

After graduating in 1961 and gaining some work experience, he began teaching at the AA, where, in the early 1970s, he met Koolhaas whilst studying the Berlin Wall in terms of its physical and symbolic nature. This gave rise to a nomadic partnership alongside their respective partners, the painters Madelon and Zoe – a partnership that was initially critical of their own school, then led by the ‘flower power’ utopian Peter Cook, leader of Archigram, against whom they set the innocent dystopias of Superstudio. The Koolhaas and Zenghelis then emigrated to the USA to find new collaborators (Ungers, Eisenman). Thus, in 1975, OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture) was founded in New York – perhaps the world’s most famous architectural practice – whose first symbol was intended to be an egg, the ‘Egg’ of the Columbus Centre, which, like the egg in Piero della Francesca’s Pala Brera, symbolised the advent of a new era – the postmodern, highly colourful era concerned with the taboos of the avant-garde, namely the metropolitan congestion of Manhattan at the heart of Delirious New York (1978), the ambitious pupil’s debut work. “Modernity has nothing to do with the avant-garde, but with a continuous rearticulation and reinvention of the conventions that exist in the work of previous modernities,” Elia wrote on the subject.

When OMA returned to Europe in the early 1980s, its Socratic approach captivated the young Zaha Hadid, OMA’s first employee, with whom the relationship cooled following the firm’s move to Rotterdam and, above all, after the competition for the Parc de la Villette in Paris – a project they narrowly missed out on due to internal disagreements – whilst it remained a cornerstone of 20th-century architecture. In 1987, Zenghelis officially left OMA, marrying his second wife, Eleni Gigantes: together they designed a major building at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin and a villa in Japan, resuming his teaching career in Düsseldorf and then in the Netherlands at the Berlage Institute, where he took on new students such as Pier Vittorio Aureli, at London’s Bartlett School (a rival to the AA), at Yale, Zurich, Lausanne, Mendrisio and finally in Thessaly, which in Greek means ‘periphery’. In the terse tribute published on the OMA website, Koolhaas wrote: “My mentor has died”, and also “His falsetto humming in our little New York living room, hunched over the drawing board, DESIGNING at 2 am, will remain proof that architecture can make you happy”.