Among the four who gave life to the earliest instances of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Zoe Zenghelis is by far the least known.
Despite that, her artistic contribution to the first works was in fact extremely important, considering the lack of built oeuvre that pushed the office to rely only on drawings and paintings (other than texts) to notify its work.
About the pre-Oma years and subsequently the first decade after the foundation (1975 to 1985): confront the very illustrative lecture by Elia Zenghelis, “The 1970’s and the beginning of Oma” given on the Berlage Institute in 2009. (Thanks, Gabriele Mastrigli, for the link)
After beginning her career as a founder of OMA, she gradually worked more for her paintings and less for architectural presentations.
Here’are some of her early renderings for OMA:
Captive globe,
Hotel Sphinx, Times Square, NY
The Egg of Columbus Center
Welfare Palace Hotel
Roosevelt Island
Lutzowstrasse Berlin
Saint Stephapons, Cephalonia
Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin
Park de la Villette, Paris
Hotel Therma, Lesbos
Antiparos housing
The Hague Parliament
Villa in Lesbos
[…] were at Rem and Elias’s side: Madelon Vriesendorp – Kooolhaas’ wife – and Zoe Zenghelis – Zenghelis’ wife -, the real responsible for those great drawings of the first OMA […]