Education
Porphyrios"s Doctor of Philosophy thesis from Princeton on the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto was later published as the book: Sources of Modern Eclecticism (Academy Editions, London, 1983). 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 (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.
What he ended up arguing is that Aalto was in many ways the end of the line for modernist architecture.
Such a viewpoint is then carried 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.
