In ancient Greece, the agora was the square where the city gathered to trade, debate and make decisions together. Joan Casals Pañella and José Luis Cisneros Bardolet took that name in 2014 for the studio they founded in Barcelona. They conceived it as a meeting place from which to think through each project together. From that shared space comes the principle that runs through all their work: fitting architecture to its social and physical context.
Both were born in Barcelona in 1982 and graduated in the same year, 2005, from the School of Architecture of the Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (ESARQ-UIC). They went on to complete the Master’s in Theory and Practice of Architectural Design at the ETSAB, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya.
Cisneros trained in the office of Josep Lluís Mateo between 2005 and 2008. There he worked on projects such as a social housing tower in Valencia, a residential block in the port of Badalona and the new school of industrial engineering in Barcelona. In 2008 he opened his own studio in Barcelona.
Casals worked with Fermín Vázquez, Juan Trias de Bes and Alfredo Arribas, and in 2020 earned his doctorate at the ETSAB with the thesis Poética en la arquitectura catalana contemporánea: la arquitectura como paisaje, el paisaje como arquitectura (Poetics in contemporary Catalan architecture: architecture as landscape, landscape as architecture). Since 2023 he has been a Serra Húnter professor in the school’s Department of Architectural Design.
The two share a career in research and teaching. They have taught at the ETSAB, at the ETSAM in Madrid, at the Faculty of Architecture and Design of Universidad Finis Terrae in Chile, and at the School of Architecture and Design of the Harbin Institute of Technology in China. They also collaborate with the research groups ARKRIT, at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, and REARQ, at the UPC, and with the UPC’s Institute for Interdisciplinary Research in Architecture.
Àgora’s work has been exhibited at the Barcelona History Museum, the Design Museum of Barcelona, the Architects’ Association of Catalonia and the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion. It has been published in Arquitectura Viva, Domus, Detail, Tectónica and Metalocus. The studio has received more than forty awards and distinctions, including several selections for the FAD Awards, the ENOR Awards and the Spanish Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism. In 2025 it won the APE Grupo Architecture Award for Casa sobre un zócalo de ladrillo (House on a brick plinth).
Between building, teaching and research, the studio holds on to the identity its name reflects: a place where architecture is thought through in common.