Elia Zenghelis

Why this line? Why here? Why not somewhere else? Why not nothing at all? She finds herself in those first months defending decisions she is not yet sure she has made on purpose.

And then somewhere in the tangle of studios and years, she meets Elia Zenghelis.

He is Greek, warm in a way that surprises her against the coolness of the city outside, and he possesses a mind that moves the way water moves, finding the crack in an argument the way water finds the crack in a wall without appearing to try.

Zenghelis teaches in Diploma Unit Nine, and what he offers his students is not so much instruction as provocation.

Brutalist concrete giving way to a creeping historicism, a return to gable roofs and red brick, and a kind of apologetic modesty after the excesses and failures of post-war planning.

Hadid has no interest in modesty.

She joins Koolhaas and his partner, Elia Zenghelis, at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, the newly founded practice that will soon reshape how a generation thinks about urbanism.

And there she works alongside them on projects that treat the city itself as raw material, vast ambitious schemes for Dutch parliamentary extensions and speculative re-imaginings of London's Boomjiz waterfront.