Demetri Porphyrios


Demetri Porphyrios is a Greek architect and author who practices architecture in London as principal of the firm Porphyrios Associates. In addition to his architectural 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.
While Porphyrios is considered to be an exponent of New Classical architecture, he has designed buildings in both the Gothic and classical idioms. Moreover, he has designed occasional buildings in a more modernist style, notably the glass curtain-walled office block One Forbury Square in Reading, Berkshire, England.

Education

Porphyrios studied at Princeton University where he earned a M.Arch., and a Ph.D. in the history and theory of architecture. He wrote his Ph.D. thesis on the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, in which he described the themes he believed had generated Aalto's work, while arguing that Aalto's work was the end of the line for modernist architecture. Published later as Sources of Modern Eclecticism, the book was presented as a structuralist analysis of Aalto's architecture; its author described as having been influenced by the philosophers Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser.
In his writing, Porphyrios has advocated a "classicism without style", similar to the Nordic Classicism that prevailed in early 20th-century Scandinavia in the work of architects such as Kay Fisker in Denmark, Gunnar Asplund in Sweden, and in the early work of Alvar Aalto in Finland.
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Career

In the 1980s, Porphyrios regularly contributed to the journal Architectural Design, advocating the classical and vernacular as rational architectural languages. In 2002, Princeton University commissioned him to design a residential college in the Collegiate Gothic style, which was completed in 2007. Following Princeton, Porphyrios began work on Selwyn College, Cambridge and Magdalen College, Oxford, adding his neoclassical style to the two ancient British universities.

Notable buildings