Déborah López is an architect and co-founder of Pareid; an interdisciplinary design and research studio. Her work approaches design from various fields and contexts addressing topics related to climate, ecology, human perception, machine sentience, and their capacity for altering current modes of existence through imminent fictions (if). Through research and interdisciplinary techno-bashing, projects are narrative driven while varying in scales and mediums, often positioning themselves within a socio-political discourse as a tool for disruption.

She is Associate Professor at The Bartlett School of Architecture UCL where she co-leads Research Cluster 1 in the BPro Program entitled “Monumental Wastelands”. The cluster focuses on themes of ‘cli-migration’ and ‘autonomous ecologies’, at local and planetary scales. Using climate fiction as a vehicle, speculations are put forward through research grounded narratives combining computational design, digital technologies, interactive virtual environments, and film.

Awarded the Monbukagakusho scholarship (MEXT) between 2014-2017, she received a Master in Engineering in the Field of Architecture from the University of Tokyo in 2016 after which she continued as researchers and tutors until 2017. Déborah received a Bachelor of Arts and Master’s of Architecture from the European University of Madrid.  

Her professional and collaborative works have been exhibited at the Barbican Centre, the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, the Seoul Biennale and the Center Pompidou among other international venues. She has presented at conferences in the United States and Europe including ACADIA Post-Human Frontiers (Taubman College, Ann Arbor 2016), Technarte Art+Technology Conference (Bilbao, 2017), COCA (ETSAM, Madrid, 2017) and ACADIA Disciplines & Disruption (MIT, Cambridge, 2017), ACADIA Distributed Proximities (USA, 2020),ACADIA Habits of the Anthropocene (University of Colorado, Denver, 2024). ‘Foll(i)cle - A Toxi-Cartographic Proposal for Bangkok’ was presented at the Royal Academy of Arts as part of the 2020 Eco-Visionaries Symposium and was also part of the Spanish Pavilion for the Venice Biennale 2021. Her professional work has been widely published in outlets such as Dezeen, ArchDaily, Metalocus, Domus and Architizer. Her built project ‘Pylonesque’ was awarded Architizer’s 2020 A+ Popular Choice Award in the category of Architecture and Water and Premio COAM Emergente 2020. She received the Arquia Innova Award in 2021. Very recently she received the award Premio COAM in the category of Interiorism 2023 for their work “Everywhere & Nowhere”. 

She is co-founder and co-editor of “Monumental Wastelands”, a two-volume augmented and bi-lingual book exploring themes of Autonomy and Logistics.  

Her most recent work revolves around non-invasive and non-destructive assembly systems, rethinking architectural construction from reclaimed materials and participatory design systems. 

Currently she is resident at Nucleo de Creación y Lengua at Universidad de las Américas in Santiago de Chile, where they develop a project entitled as “Accelerated Ecologies”.