Demetri Porphyrios

Who is 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 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 PhD thesis from Princeton on the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto was later published as the book: Sources of Modern Eclecticism. To this day, it is regarded as the most astute theoretical analysis of Aalto's architecture ever made, being concerned not so much with formal analysis or historical chronology but rather with a structuralist analysis of Aalto's works in terms of the themes that can be said to have generated them; such as typology, urbanism and nature. What he ended up arguing is that Aalto was in many ways the end of the line for modernist architecture.