Zoe Zenghelis
“How would you spend a day indulging in cultural pursuits?” an interviewer once asked painter Zoe Zenghelis. She responded that her choice would be “walking and looking at streets, buildings, trees and plants, or looking at design in general.”1 For her, the building blocks of the city were not mundane reality but a basis for aesthetic experience—she was keen to locate geometric order even in the most haphazard of cities and delighted in expressing it through art.
Trained as a stage designer at Regent Street Polytechnic, London, Zenghelis had a variety of creative means at her disposal. Zenghelis employed what she called a “sun-drenched palette” to enrich aerial perspectives by her colleagues at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), which she founded in 1975 with Rem Koolhaas, Madelon Vriesendorp, and her husband Elia Zenghelis.2 Her eloquent use of color gave life and legibility to the group’s conceptually rigorous work. In Hotel Sphinx (The Head) Project, New York, New York (1975), the various functions to be housed in the edifice—the theater, the auditorium, the ballroom and the garden, to name a few—are distinguished from one another and thus made decipherable through color. The same approach to color informed Lützowstraße Housing, Berlin, Germany (1980), a proposal for social housing that allows the scheme to be read as distinct groups of interrelated and interconnected structures. Zenghelis’s work was essential in establishing revelatory new aesthetics for representing architecture that persist today.
Zenghelis, alongside Vriesendorp, ran the Color Workshop at London’s Architectural Association School of Architecture (A.A.). “We tried to show our students how to use watercolors, acrylic and oil and then how to paint shadows, reflections, glass, mirrors, metal, marble, wood, etc., and through this to convey mood, reduce or enlarge scale and intensify sensation,” she would later remember.3 The two were particularly interested in the way layering acrylic paint could produce the same effect as oil, with brighter and bolder colors. Eventually, they moved to the school’s Communications Department, where they encouraged students to reflect on architecture’s intersections with photography and printmaking—“buildings are not black lines on white paper,” Zenghelis insisted, viewing architecture as a storytelling device, a communication tool with which to convey information.4
In 1985, Paintings by Zoe Zenghelis opened in the Architectural Association’s Exhibition Gallery and represented both the theoretical architecture that she conceptualized with her colleagues at OMA and the painterly aesthetic that she pursued independently. The fantastic landscapes and abstractions that she painted contained shapes suggesting buildings, and, reviewing the exhibition, critic Jasia Reichardt wrote, “I think of the architecture of imaginary film sets, a catalogue of prototypical elements—dwellings, elevations, stairwells, gymnasiums, entrance halls, bridges, garages, motels—against which a film director might set his drama.”5
Da Hyung Jeong, 2019–20 Mellon-Marron Museum Research Consortium Fellow
Haig Beck, “Toward an Architecture of Congestion,” Express Extra 2 (1982), 3.
“An Artist in an Architectural Context: Paintings by Zoe Zenghelis,” AA Files 10 (Autumn 1985), 62.
“Roosevelt Island: Zoe Zenghelis on Painting and OMA,” Drawing Matter, February 17, 2019, https://www.drawingmatter.org/drawings/autographical-2/roosevelt-island-zoe-zenghelis-oma/.
Exhibitions
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216: Building Citizens
Ongoing
MoMA
Collection gallery
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9 + 1 Ways of Being Political: 50 Years of Political Stances in Architecture and Urban Design
Sep 12, 2012–Jun 9, 2013
MoMA
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Contemporary Collection
Nov 16, 2011–Feb 9, 2014
MoMA
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194X–9/11: American Architects and the City
Jul 1, 2011–Jan 2, 2012
MoMA
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Building Collections: Recent Acquisitions of Architecture
Nov 10, 2010–May 30, 2011
MoMA
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Zoe Zenghelis has
15 exhibitionsonline.
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Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesendorp, Zoe Zenghelis Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture: Prologue 1972
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Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesendorp, Zoe Zenghelis Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture: Exhausted Fugitives Led to Reception 1972
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Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesendorp, Zoe Zenghelis Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture: The Strip (Aerial Perspective) 1972
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Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesendorp, Zoe Zenghelis Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture: The Strip 1972
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Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesendorp, Zoe Zenghelis Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture: The Reception Area 1972
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Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesendorp, Zoe Zenghelis Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture: The Central Area 1972
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Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesendorp, Zoe Zenghelis Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture: Training the New Arrivals (Axonometric projection) 1972
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Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesendorp, Zoe Zenghelis Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture: The Tip of the Strip 1972
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Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesendorp, Zoe Zenghelis Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture: The Baths (Axonometric projection) 1972
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Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesendorp, Zoe Zenghelis Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture: The Baths 1972
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Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesendorp, Zoe Zenghelis Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture: The Square of the Muses 1972
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Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesendorp, Zoe Zenghelis Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture: The Institute of Biological Transactions (Plan oblique) 1972
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Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesendorp, Zoe Zenghelis Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture: The Park of Aggression 1972
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Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesendorp, Zoe Zenghelis Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture: The Central Area (Plan) 1972
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Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesendorp, Zoe Zenghelis Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture: The Allotments 1972
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Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesendorp, Zoe Zenghelis Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture: The Allotments 1972
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Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesendorp, Zoe Zenghelis Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture: The Avowal 1972
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Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesendorp, Zoe Zenghelis Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture: The Allotments 1972
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Rem Koolhaas, Zoe Zenghelis, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesendorp Egg of Columbus Circle project, New York, New York (Axonometric) 1975
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Rem Koolhaas, Zoe Zenghelis New Welfare Island Project, Roosevelt Island, New York, NY (Aerial perspective) c. 1975-76
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Elia Zenghelis, Zoe Zenghelis Hotel Sphinx Project, New York, New York (Axonometric) 1975–1976
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Zoe Zenghelis, Elia Zenghelis Hotel Sphinx (The Head) Project, New York, New York (Axonometric) 1975
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Rem Koolhaas, Zoe Zenghelis New Welfare Island Project, Roosevelt Island, New York, NY (Convention Center Entrance, aerial perspective) c.1975-76
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Elia Zenghelis, Zoe Zenghelis Lützowstrasse Housing, IBA Housing Competition project, Berlin, Germany (Cutaway axonometric) 1980
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Elia Zenghelis, Zoe Zenghelis Lutzowstrasse, IBA Housing Competition, project, Berlin, Germany, Axonometric 1981
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Elia Zenghelis, Zoe Zenghelis Lutzowstrasse, IBA Housing Competition, project, Berlin, Germany, Three perspectives 1981
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Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Zoe Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesendorp Boompjes Tower Slab, project, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, Perspective 1981
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Elia Zenghelis, Zoe Zenghelis Sixteen Villas on the Island of Antiparos, Antiparos, Greece, Conceptual plan 1981
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Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Zoe Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesendorp Boompjes Tower Slab Project, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, (Rotterdam Summation) 1983
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