Starting after a second place competition win

Although we met while working at an architecture office in Bangkok in 2013, Pareid had its eventual start as a studio at an undefined and fuzzy moment in 2018. Sometime after finishing our master’s and beginning to teach at the University of Tokyo we submitted our thesis for a competition and were shortlisted as one of four teams to be funded for further development. We ended up getting second prize in the overall competition, which of course was bittersweet, but enough to get us started.

Our longest ongoing project to date

From our current track record, it would seem we have more tricks on how to get second place haha. We tend to over work proposals that consume a lot of energy and time, and with no guarantee of it being successful. However, this allows/forces us to keep projects alive even after they’ve ‘failed’ (at least the ones we think are worth it). In our case, it so happened that an entry where we were awarded second place in 2018 was later discussed with a person who was very interested in the approach and wanted to sponsor it. The research oriented project, ‘Fol(i)cle’, was eventually picked back up, further developed, and is still ongoing; which actually makes it our longest project to date.

Reconciling private and public life

Our professional life is divided between Pareid and teaching; which we enjoy. A lot of our moving has actually been linked to where we can do both; for instance, we are now teaching at the Bartlett and are now London based, before which were teaching at INDA and were Bangkok based, and same with the University of Tokyo and being Tokyo based. We consider both aspects as bi-directional extensions of each other; feeding between the real with hints of experimentation, and the experimental with hints of the real, developing our research and practice through climate fiction and speculations on their imminent and long term implications. Our schedule is always in a bit of flux between these two, so we definitely need to have some mental dexterity to get around having an ad-hoc routine. It’s also hard to consider our private life without our professional life, which we simply try to use playfully and to some advantage.

Getting over hierarchies and moving towards fluidity

Founded at 35°44'48.53"N , 139°45'13.95"E. Currently set at 13°44'28.58"N ,100°32'39.75"E. Active in between 42°32'59.98"N , 6°35'53.71"W and  34° 8'56.30"N, 118°27'4.88"W. Our studio space has been constantly changing, so we tend to define it as coordinates as opposed to a fixed physical space. In general, we like to have a dedicated model making area to maintain a flow while iterating between digital and analog mediums. But it isn’t always possible as we have moved quite a lot during the past few years, and so have also gotten used to considering our studio as nomadic and defined by wherever our laptops and internet connections are. That is especially true now, where due to the Covid-19 situation we have temporarily (and indefinitely) relocated to Spain although we technically live in London. There isn’t much in terms of hierarchies; it’s a bit fluid in that way.

Slowly becoming versatile

For the moment we are quite content with the type of work we have been able to develop as it fits between our interests. This is also probably thanks to being able to have a foot in teaching and a foot in professional practice. At some moment in our career it felt as though we would be confined to doing a specific type of work, but luckily that wasn’t the case.

Looking towards diversity in projects

For the moment, our Pylonesque project is the largest we’ve completed and that we identify with in various ways. We consider most of our works to be multi-faceted and integrated under the broader notion of ecology addressing connections between different human and non-human agents, materiality and fabrication, local and global contexts, technology, perception and aesthetics. Our next set of goals are probably two fold; to grow in scale and program, and to continue broadening and diversifying the scale and types of projects we take on; either being directly or tangentially related to architecture. We like the kind of diversity that the expansion of the field provides and being able to jump into smaller installations, prototypes as well as the architectural scale, and occasionally tap into something that may or may not be considered architecture.