The Firm That Left Its Founders’ Names Off the Door

For A Parallel Architecture's co-principals, leaving their own names off of their practice's title wasn’t a rejection of anything in particular. Both founders had worked happily at firms structured the more traditional way. What stayed with Eric Barth from those years was something smaller and more specific: watching a project he’d spent years of his life on get credited to a figurehead who’d barely touched it. Barth says, “This is a common frustration in the industry, and unfairly downplays the amount of teamwork involved in executing a high-caliber project.”

That instinct shaped how the studio actually runs. The office isn’t structured top-down; everyone on the team, and by the studio’s own account, everyone from staff to the stonemason on site, is meant to feel real ownership of a project, not just execute on behalf of someone else’s name. That extends to the studio’s relationship with clients and collaborators more broadly. A Parallel Architecture asks a great deal of the people involved in any project: trust from clients, patience from trades and city officials, years of sustained effort from its own team. The studio’s reasoning is that leaving personal credit off the work makes it easier to ask that much of people, since no one can suspect the request is self-serving.

The West Lynn's Residence's design approach was straightforward: identify, preserve, and enhance the original structure while introducing a complementary but contrasting modern language to serve the client’s programmatic requirements. The original Georgian-Revival home, recognizable in plan for its symmetry and thickened walls, is accompanied by an organic, open-plan addition that shifts the focus to the outdoors, with glass walls, deep overhangs, and indeterminate thresholds.

Design decisions are held to the same standard. The studio describes its process as solution-based rather than concept-first. Every choice has to be justified by a real problem it solves, and ideas that can’t clear that bar don’t survive long internally. That shows up most clearly in how consistent, and inconsistent, the work looks project to project. A Parallel doesn’t impose a signature aesthetic across its portfolio, but instead, each site’s own constraints, a steep hillside or a flat treeless lot, are treated as the actual source of the design. A recurring interest, like the client-driven mathematics at Water’s Edge or the Japanese influence at Terrace Mountain, functions only as an internal filter for testing decisions, never as the concept itself. The goal, as Barth puts it, is a house where a typical visitor “would never consciously think about the underlying mathematical order, or Japanese influence,” and would simply respond to the building in front of them.

In Terrace Mountain, the Japanese influence shows up throughout in specific, considered choices: a sunken hearth in place of a conventional fireplace, imported Japanese tile, bonsai trees inside the living room, and a raking garden the client wanted to physically descend into and inhabit rather than simply view from a window.

In the West Lynn Residence, a new helical stair stands as a modern homage to the non-salvageable original feature.

The ideal client, in Burke's description, is engaged enough to give thoughtful feedback, then willing to step back and trust the process rather than arrive with a solution already in hand. It's a partnership as much as a hire, the client's insight paired with the studio's discipline. “We're always looking for the fundamental motivations that are driving a client's decisions or feedback so that we have enough room to spread our wings, test things, and really explore options without ever feeling like we're handcuffed,” says Barth.

This sinuous lake-front home’s light floating roofs are anchored to its site by heavy rusticated limestone masses, while its horizontal footprint is spread out and sewn through the vertical punctuation of mature sycamore, cypress and pecan trees.

At the glassy center of the Lake Austin home, the structural system is exposed to reveal a rhythmic steel vertebrate that organizes the primary public spaces and provides definition and scale to the spacious rooms.

Asked what it hopes to contribute to residential design in the U.S. right now, the studio points less to a stylistic agenda than to a working method: landscape-driven, solution-based architecture built for permanence rather than trend, the kind of building that “isn’t going to be torn down or remodeled in ten years,” remarks Burke.

In the Lake Austin home, a warm interior palette of oak, mahogany and cedar serve as a soft counterpoint to the glass and stone, exuding a relaxed livability paramount to the homeowner.

That same instinct extends to how the studio talks about AI and platforms like ArchiPro. A Parallel doesn’t use generative AI in its design process, citing what it sees as a growing flood of fabricated, never-built projects circulating online. “These are real projects that face real hurdles,” Barth says of the studio’s own portfolio. “They had real budgets. There were real people behind them.” The studio sees value in a platform where its work sits alongside other real, built projects, so a prospective client isn’t left trying to sort out what’s genuine.

Explore A Parallel Architecture on ArchiPro, browse the studio’s residential projects across the country, and discover more architects and designers building a practice around their site, not their signature.

Water's Edge is composed of large glass walls on both sides of the central living volume that can open completely, and motorized solar screens drop down to turn the entire center of the house into a screened porch when the weather allows, keeping bugs out without closing the space in.

When the clients for Terrace Mountain arrived at their initial meeting, they already had an idea of the style and architecture they wanted to pursue: Japanese design, though not simply for its look. The studio pushed past aesthetics into what A Parallel Architect’s Principal Ryan Burke calls its “deeper motivations,” the relationship between intimate gardens and the building itself, and how a person moves through and inhabits them day to day.