Demetri Porphyrios

Demetri Porphyrios (Greek: Δημήτρης Πορφύριος; born 1949) is a Greek architect and author who practices architecture in London as principal of the firm Porphyrios Associates. In addition to practice and writing, Porphyrios has held a number of teaching positions in the United States, the United Kingdom and Greece. He is currently a visiting professor at the Yale School of Architecture.

He is a representative of New Classical Architecture. Most of his buildings resemble traditional architecture such as Gothic and Greco-Roman Classical buildings.

Porphyrios's Ph. D. thesis from Princeton on the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto was later published as the book: Sources of Modern Eclecticism (Academy Editions, London, 1983). The work is a theoretical analysis of Aalto's architecture, concerned not so much with formal analysis or historical chronology but rather with a structuralist analysis (and in this regard he gives reference to philosophers Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser) of Aalto's works in terms of the themes that can be said to have generated them; such as typology, urbanism and nature. He argues that Aalto was in many ways the end of the line for modernist architecture. This view carries through in Porphyrios's other writings (and most evident in his own architecture) where he has argued for a 'classicism without style', what he has also referred to as Doricism. Ironically, it was a similar style that dominated Scandinavia in the early decades of the 20th century, so-called Nordic Classicism, epitomised by the work of Kay Fisker in Denmark, Gunnar Asplund in Sweden, and the early work of Alvar Aalto in Finland.

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