Elia Zenghelis. Immagine Emblema Manifesto / Image Embleme Manifesto

As part of the Villard stage held in Greece (4-6 April 2019), curated by Georgios Panetsos, Elia Zenghelis accompanied the group of teachers and students on the itinerant trip from Athens to Patras, to then carry out a lectio magistralis and actively participate in the jury of projects for Ischia at the Patras School of Architecture. The lectio, retracing the master’s professional and didactic experiences through iconic images, focuses on a design attitude, matured in over 50 years of activity, rooted on principles that are now widespread but not taken for granted and dangerously set to become empty slogans: the pre-eminence of form against the function; the project as a knowledge tool; the image as a manifesto. In the background of the narrative path emerges an extraordinary sensitivity towards contingent phenomena; confidence in the theoretical debate between intellectuals; passion for the figurative arts intended as a refuge/archive for the interpretation of reality; dedication to teaching as a mission. Starting from the sequence of highly evocative images proposed by Zenghelis in the lectio, the text presented here is a ‘reconstruction’ of the original audio, which has arrived in bad condition. The result is a critical reading of the works, based on historical and bibliographic references, which aims to highlight the most original aspects of the master’s design approach. We thank Elia Zenghelis for the opportunity to publish in this volume some of the images he proposed as part of the lectio, in memory of an educational event that affected the experimentations presented by the students in the final stage of Villard:20 and that, we are sure, it will represent an indelible trace in the training path of the entire Villard class.