José de Paiva holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge. He has taught at Cambridge and throughout the UK, in Europe and the United States. Prior to joining Eric Parry Architects, he was Visiting Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design.
His time in practice began in Lisbon more than 20 years ago. Since joining EPA in 2012, he has served as direct aide to the Principal in projects spanning architecture, publications and film as part of a broad range of activity.
José was involved in competition schemes for the Cities of London and Westminster; in exhibition designs for the Royal Academy, The British School at Rome and Sir John Soane’s Museum. He also advised the Portsmouth Naval Base Property Trust on behalf of Eric Parry with a view to the considerable expansion of the public realm of the Naval Base (HMNB Portsmouth).
As a scholar, he has organised international conferences and seminars: on The Living Memory of Cities, first with the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon and then in collaboration with London Metropolitan University. He also contributed to the series of seminars on Presence, Person, Beauty, a series of talks on sacred space he organised in collaboration with Canon Peter Newby and Eric Parry, all of which are available on our website.
Also on film, he has been helping Academy Award® winning director Jon Blair with the production of a documentary on architecture, featuring Eric Parry Architects, entitled The Art of Architecture, which will première soon in the UK.
He has supervised a number of publications and books on the practice: Eric Parry Architects Volume 3 (Artifice, 2015 and 2018), Eric Parry Architects Volume 4 (Artifice, 2018), Eric Parry: Drawing (Sir John Soane’s Museum, 2019), The City Works: Eric Parry Architects (Rightangle, 2021), Eric Parry Architects Volume 5 (2023), Art and Architecture in Dialogue (Scala, ongoing) and Eric Parry Architects Volume 6 (Artifice, ongoing).
He is the book author of Fragments towards a Theology of Architecture (Hinterland, 2015) and editor of The Living Tradition of Architecture (Routledge, 2017); and is currently working on a book on Presence and Distance: Essays on Sacred Art and Architecture (ongoing).
