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Porphyrios is an advisor to the Prince of Wales, another noted proponent of classical architecture in the modern age. They both emphasize the importance of designs responsive to region, climate, nature, and culture.

One example of Porphyrios's work is the auditorium at Magdalen College, Oxford University, in the United Kingdom. This campus includes buildings of varied scale and character going back to the 15th-century. The new auditorium, while fitting into its traditional setting, provides fully modern lecture and performance facilities.

Similarly, at Whitman College, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, a composition of advancing and receding dormitory building volumes, still under construction, are organized around open courts. The residential complex is designed in the "Princeton Collegiate Gothic" style, complementing the existing campus buildings.

Porphyrios describes the historic Princeton campus as "an architecture of robust, durable, civil, and beautiful buildings. Their materials weather, age, and mature with usage and time. If architecture is to justify its existence, it must continue to occupy itself with values. The new Whitman College furthers a tradition that has permanent value and perpetual modernity."

Classical Town Planning

One of Porphyrios Associates' urban projects is the Town of Pitiousa, Greece. The firm extended the existing island town of Spetses along traditional urban and architectural principles. The new town comprises 72 villas and an infrastructure of gardens, streets, and squares, maintaining the historic hierarchies between the public and private realms.

In Porphyrios's plan, new houses derive their forms from local traditional typologies. Differences in topography, treatment of architectural elements, and color introduce variety while maintaining an overall urban cohesion.

Three Brindleyplace Office Building in Birmingham, United Kingdom is Porphyrios Associates' contribution to a mixed-use development designed by several firms. The massing of Three Brindleyplace presents a civic front facing a square and steps down towards a canal. A tower rises as if embedded within the urban block and serves as a landmark for the entire development.

The building has an ashlar stone base with an arcade at ground level. All architectural projections and rusticated surfaces are of reconstituted stone. Cornices, window surrounds, and string courses all lend the building a sculptural character.

In Porphyrios's words: "Along the elevation to the main square the interweaving of the arcade arches imparts a pictorial depth to the plane of the wall, with half-round relieving arches transferring the weight onto piers and quarter-engaged Doric columns.

"Thus a figure-ground dialogue emerges: from a structural viewpoint, the half-round arch is the figure, while the pointed arch becomes a figure only on account of the resultant void. This constant oscillation in the reading of figure-ground is heightened further by the memory of the trabeated system to which the Doric columns allude. Here, where the building addresses the public square, the history of western structural traditions is narrated in stone."

Porphyrios Associates created another urban master plan for Trowbridge, Wiltshire, United Kingdom. Their vision is to serve as a guide for future development and to encourage interpretative freedom for future architects. The existing town has "escaped modernist development," and the master plan provides continuity between past and future with a network of streets and public spaces.

Porphyrios says: "Our conceptual master plan for Trowbridge follows the humanist principles of traditional urbanism, [responding] to the changing patterns of life and of the business community, while ensuring that growth is always sympathetic to the human scale of Trowbridge."

The annual Richard H. Driehaus award is intended to promote such ideas of classicism and humanism. The prize was endowed by its namesake, the founder and chairman of Driehaus Capital Management in Chicago and supporter of numerous historic preservation projects.

Driehaus established the award through the University of Notre Dame's School of Architecture because of its reputation for incorporating the ideals of traditional architecture into modern urban development. Porphyrios will be honored in a ceremony March 20,2004 at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Town of Pitiousa, Greece master-planned by Demetri Porphyrios, who has just received the Richard H. Driehaus Prize for Classical Architecture. Photo: Porphyrios Associates Three Brindleyplace Office Building in Birmingham, United Kingdom. Photo: Porphyrios Associates Urban master plan for Trowbridge, Wiltshire, United Kingdom. Photo: Porphyrios Associates   Click on thumbnail images to view full-size pictures.