Elia Zenghelis helped establish OMA while building a second, unusually mobile practice in the architecture studio, teaching from London to Dusseldorf and Yale. The Greek-born British architect and educator died in August 2026 at 89, ArchDaily reported.

Born in Athens in 1937, Zenghelis grew up through the German occupation of Greece and the civil war that followed. An issue of Architectural Record praising the Architectural Association's experimental teaching drew him to London in 1956. He graduated in 1961, then returned to the school as an instructor in 1963. Those beginnings, documented by Architectural Record, joined education and practice at the start of his career rather than treating them as separate paths.

The school also brought him into contact with Rem Koolhaas, then his student. In 1975, Zenghelis, Koolhaas, Zoe Zenghelis, and Madelon Vriesendorp founded the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, a partnership confirmed in OMA's own history. Early proposals made drawings and arguments as consequential as completed structures. Hotel Sphinx reimagined a Times Square hotel as dense urban housing, while the 1972 Exodus project joined architecture to a provocative story about the city. MoMA now lists 30 Zenghelis works online, including the collaborative Exodus drawings.

Zenghelis led OMA in London from 1980 to 1987 and in Athens from 1982 to 1987. His work touched the Dutch Parliament extension, housing on Lutzowstrasse in Berlin, and the 1982 Parc de la Villette competition in Paris. At Checkpoint Charlie, an idea became an inhabited piece of divided Berlin: OMA records 26 apartments arranged above facilities for customs workers and Allied forces. The building was completed in 1990, soon after the Berlin Wall fell.

After leaving OMA in 1987, Zenghelis formed Gigantes Zenghelis Architects with Eleni Gigantes. The practice completed the Ashikita House of Youth in Kumamoto, Japan, in 1998, with its long, rolling roof. Yet teaching increasingly claimed the center of his working life. He held the Baukunst professorship at Kunstakademie Dusseldorf from 1990 to 2002 and taught at the Berlage Institute, EPFL, ETH Zurich, and Mendrisio. RIBA recognized that work with the Annie Spink Award for Excellence in Education in 2000.

His classrooms kept connecting architecture to the city. At Yale, where he was a Norman R. Foster Visiting Professor, a 2017 studio returned to the ancient Long Walls between Athens and Piraeus and asked students to imagine new public centers along their route. Harvard Graduate School of Design also identified him as one of Zaha Hadid's early teachers when he spoke at a 2016 event devoted to her work.

Zenghelis's work persists in several forms at once: the Checkpoint Charlie apartments in Berlin, the Ashikita building in Japan, OMA's early projects and drawings in MoMA's collection, and the design problems carried forward by students from the AA to Yale. Together they show an architect who treated the drawing, the building, and the studio critique as related ways to remake the city.