Ernesto Paredes was born in Callao, Peru, in 1928, and gained a Diploma in Architecture from the 'Escuela Nacional de Ingenieres' (now Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería), Lima. He then undertook graduate studies at the Institute of Urban Planning, within the same university, and by 1952 was practicing as an architect, recorded as having been commissioned (with Luis Ortiz de Zevallos, Arrisueño M.R. Pérez León) to develop a model town for the W.R. Grace and Company trading house (unrealised). In 1954 he came to the UK, enrolling as a postgraduate student for the inaugural year of the Architectural Association Department of Tropical Architecture. At the completion of the course he appears to have attended the CIAM Summer School in Venice, 1956, but to have returned to Peru by 1958 where he worked with Mario Peschiera - their modernist house in San Isidro being published in a 1961 issue of El Arquitecto Peruano. During this period, he also appears to have been friends with the architect and future theorist on informal ‘self-help’ housing in South America, John F.C. Turner, whom he had met at the AA in 1954.

Paredes was selected one of the Peruvian participants for the celebrated PREVI Experimental Housing Project in Lima, 1967-1973 and his career moved into urban planning and government development work, acting as Architect to the Secretary General of the Ministry of Development by 1967. Eleven years later, he was appointed Director-General for Tourism in Peru, a position held until 1981, when he was made Secretary of State for Tourism. In his latter years, Paredes served as the President of the Geographical Society of Lima, actively promoting urban conservation and development schemes. 

Sources

• Architectural Association Student Register 1945-1972, AA Archives
• Architectural Association Diploma Roll Book, 1924-1963, AA Archives
• Department of Tropical Architecture, student listing, Otto Koenigsberger Collection, Box OK27, AA Archives
• Architectural Association List of Members, 1961, 1969.
• Plan Regulador de Paramonga” El Arquitecto Peruano 19, no. 216-218 (July-September 1955)
• Alvaro Ortiz Lozano, Jacques Torías  Plan de desarrollo económico y social de Santander, 1964-1967, Volume 2,  1963
• Residencia en San Isidro. (1961). El Arquitecto Peruano, 282-283-284, p40-42
• Marcia N. Koth, Julio A. Silva, Albert George Henry Dietz, Housing in Latin America, MIT School of Engineering, 1964.
• ‘Nuevo Secretario de Estado de Turismo en el Peru’ World Travel – Tourism Mondial, 1981, Vol. 158, p10
• García-Huidobro, F., Torres Torriti, D., Nicolás Trugas, N. El tiempo construye! : el Proyecto Experimental de Vivienda (PREVI) de Lima : génesis y desenlace = Time builds! : the Experimental Housing Project (PREVI), Lima : genesis and outcome  G. Gili, c2008