Braha Kunda, Architect & Designer

 

"If it's not fun it's not sustainable!"

 

Braha Kunda is an Environmental Designer, an Architect and a Senior Lecturer at HIT (Holon Institute of Technology) in Israel. She is the former Head of the Interior Design Department at HIT and a faculty member who took a prominent part in its formation and development.

Braha graduated from the Environmental Design Department at Bezalel Art & Design Academy in Jerusalem, and completed her Master Degree in Architecture at Rice University, USA, where she composed her thesis titled: "Tel Aviv – the Locus of Collective Amnesia".

Her rich career as a practitioner and educator brings forth a holistic, contextual and human centered design philosophy and methodologies. She is deeply interested in the social and cultural aspects of architecture and in the fundamental meaning of belonging-ness and physical places to humans' well being.

In the recent years Braha pursues integrative and multi-disciplinary design methodologies as means to connect between humans, both as individuals and as communities, to the common grounds. As a part of that, she brought her research for connections between top-down macro perceptions to bottom-up (grass root) design to several Ecoweek workshops, which she tutored and initiated, such as Bike Routes – as means for urban revival in Holon (2012), and a Street market in Copenhagen (2013).

She had recently participated in the Heschel Organization Environmental Leadership program and at present she is involved in establishing Designers' Hubs for sustainability in the Israeli periphery, as means of creating connections between communities to their places through the application of various design and art media.

In addition to her practice in building re-use and urban interventions she is also an initiator and group member of the Non-Place. Non-Place art&design project's blog: http://Non-place.biz