about me

a glimpse

I am Bruna Mayer de Souza. A PhD urbanist and architect from Brazil, currently based in Brooklyn, NY – now working with people to design their world from the inside out. My work lives at the intersection of architecture, philosophy, technology, and the design of human experience.

I am a creative, passionate, joyful being.

I’ve spent most of my life trying to understand one thing: How can we live a good life that is also good for the world?

That question took me through architecture, sustainable design, teaching, and a PhD in Urbanism where I coined the concept of the Hybrid Place — the layered reality we now all inhabit, where physical space, digital mediation, and inner experience are woven together into one continuous world.

the full journey

I started in architecture in 2006, wanting to do something good for the world. Sustainability was the goal — lower impact, better buildings. But the deeper I went, the more the question kept moving.

In 2011, I joined the Brazilian team that built a solar-powered house for the Solar Decathlon Europe competition in Madrid. That was the first turn: I saw that how people use a space shapes its sustainability far more than the technology inside it. The real question wasn't the building. It was human behavior — the choices people actually make, and what shapes them.

So I moved toward understanding those choices. I taught architecture and urbanism for several years, then began a PhD to go further. I set out to study sustainable mobility, but the ground shifted again: smartphones and the constant internet were quietly changing how we experience place itself. My research became an exploration of what I came to call hybrid place — the reality we now live in, where physical space and digital layers form one lived situation, and where attention decides where we actually are.

That work became my doctoral dissertation, Dwelling in Hybrid Places, grounded in phenomenology and the philosophy of place. But the PhD was the beginning, not the end. Since then I have been working on turning the academic insight into applicable frameworks and projects that can help us have a better life and create a better world. The Architecture of Experience and The Poetic Arch are two of these.

And this journey was beyond academic, too. Alongside the research, I have been exploring practices that work through the body as much as the mind — meditation, inquiry, movement, and dance. Experience is not only processed in the mind, it is received through the whole body, and developing my relationship with it was a crucial part in expanding my fulfillment.

Background:

  • Bachelor's Degree in Architecture and Urbanism — Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), 2011. Final project: Coloring Life in Tapera — a proposal of social housing for the future

  • Master's Degree in Urbanism, History and Architecture of the City — Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), 2013. Thesis: Solar Decathlon Europe 2012 and Its Potential for Sustainable Choices

  • PhD in Urbanism, PROURB / Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, 2022. Dissertation: Dwelling in Hybrid Places: the experience of place with ubiquitous internet

  • Visiting Scholar, Washington University in St. Louis

  • Professor of Architecture and Urbanism, 2015–2019

  • Communications Coordinator, Brazil's Solar Decathlon Europe team (2012)

  • Published research in peer-reviewed journals including V!RUS and Energy and Buildings