From 1971 to 1975 Zenghelis collaborated with various architects in London, Paris and New York: Georges Candilis, Michael Carapetian, Aristeides Romanos, Rem Koolhaas, O.M.
51, 1981) noted in regards to his houses in Antiparos, that "Since Elia Zenghelis and Rem Koolhaas formally founded OMA over six years ago, their work, recently described by Bob Maxwell ‘as a series of paradoxes: reductivist yet metaphoric, polemical yet exquisite, modern, yet anti-modern’, has revealed subtle shifts of concern.
This idiosyncratic evolution has now moved from Manhattanism to Mediterraneanism; their current project for a series of villas on Antiparos reflects a development of the OMA rationale skilfully crafted with Aegean traditions."
This evaluation is somewhat misleading, however, in that after this work Zenghelis still worked in projects in West Berlin, especially the urban infill, part of the IBA Berlin project, in which the city set up a series of invited architectural competitions among avant-gardist architects of the time (including Aldo Rossi, Peter Eisenman and Rob Krier) to design infills on sites throughout the city.
By the late 60s the Architectural Association had become a breeding ground for radical ideas and even before I met Rem Koolhaas as a student in 2nd year I had left my job and centred my life at the school."