Alumni José Luis Cisneros and Joan Casals Pañella, both of who earned an undergraduate degree from the UIC Barcelona School of Architecture in 2005, were recently named winners of a Young Architects' Association of Catalonia (AJAC) Award. The submitted project, titled “Casa Caballero”, earned the pair recognition in the Interior Renovation category.

The project, which consists of a flexible thirty-five-square-metre ground floor home, seeks to salvage an abandoned interior courtyard located in the Barcelona district of Les Corts. The proposal, replete with ingenious construction solutions aimed at ensuring damp control, programme availability and easy facility operation, is an act of reflection, through the prism of materiality, on how to vividly convey the exterior experience inside. 

José Luis Cisneros and Joan Casals Pañella are founding partners of AGORA, a studio that, in their own words, “was created for the purpose of joint contemplation on the difficult matter of reconciling architecture with the social and physical context”. In recent years, the studio has received several distinctions, and its work has been published in major media outlets such as METALOCUS, DOMUS and TECTÓNICA.

The AJAC Awards have been organised every year since 1996 with a view to showing society the potential and quality of the work done by young architects in Catalonia, while, at the same time, successfully disseminating their work.  

“For us at AGORA, receiving this honour is confirmation that, as young architects, we are on the right path; a path we are excited to keep treading”, admitted Cisneros and Casals.