A Forbes Under 30 honoree in 2024, architect, designer, speaker, university professor and columnist Jeferson Branco is one of the most expressive voices of the new generation of Brazilian design. Leading the creative direction of the studio that bears his name, Jeferson Branco Arquitetura, based in Itajaí (SC), operating throughout Brazil and with an international presence, he is building a career marked by authorship, by an appreciation of Brazilian raw materials and by a sophisticated reading of the sociocultural transformations of our time.
His training combines technique and sensibility. A graduate in Architecture and Urbanism, Jeferson completed part of his degree at California Baptist University, in California (USA), and interned at D-Scheme Studio, in San Francisco, experiences that expanded his worldview and consolidated his global approach, without giving up a profoundly Latin and Brazilian identity.
National recognition came while he was still an undergraduate, with first place overall in the 22nd Concurso Estudos Deca, in São Paulo, and first place in the Subway Station category, awards that led him to debut at CASACOR Santa Catarina 2018 with the project Habitat Deca, still as a student. The space, which proposed a genderless bathroom as a manifesto for inclusion and for the adaptation of architecture to social change, anticipated the questioning and sensitive nature that would mark his entire body of work, even influencing later guidelines of the competition, which came to include the mandatory presence of gender inclusion proposals.
Since then, Jeferson has taken part in several editions of the show, including the loft meu.coração.queima and the bar t3chno.DELTA, always articulating aesthetics, technology and social discourse. His work stands out for uniting conceptual thinking and rigorous execution, reflecting a practice that understands the project as narrative and storytelling: a dialogue between matter, memory and behavior.
In recent years, the studio has expanded its practice to different scales, from high-rise residential buildings and interiors to furniture, lighting and design objects. His collections, such as the Kûara lamps, the Protozoa rugs, the Irupé and Runa side tables, and the Mercúrio bench, explore the boundaries between art and design with a poetic and experimental eye. Working with reclaimed Brazilian stone, cast aluminum, reforestation timber and PET recovered from the oceans, the architect builds a language that fuses ancestry and futurism, nature and technology, Brazilianness and sophistication.
In 2025, Jeferson joined the national roster of 20 professionals invited to sign Casa Dexco, a show that occupied the Conjunto Nacional, in São Paulo, curated by Allex Colontonio and André Rodrigues (Decornautas). His interpretation of the theme Neomodernism reinforced the maturity of his aesthetic research, with sculptural volumes, chromatic balance and a materiality that evokes the past reinterpreted through a contemporary gaze.
Consolidating his relevance on the national scene, he closed the year 2025 as the winner of the competition for the Santa Catarina pavilion at the Bienal de Arquitetura Brasileira, reaffirming his commitment to valuing regional architecture in dialogue with the contemporary.
Beyond the shows, his design pieces have been gaining prominence in important national and international outlets and fairs, such as the Kûara collection at Maison&Objet, during Paris design week, the Luiz Antonio collection at Milan design week, and publications such as Forbes Life Design, Casa Vogue, Casa e Jardim, Elle Decor and Bazaar Interiores Brasil. The Irupé wall table, for example, was published in the November 2024 issue of Forbes Life Design, while the Protozoa rug was part of the 10+ selection by Casa e Jardim.
His research starts from a sociological and philosophical gaze on human behavior and on how that relationship turns into product, a field he deepens in his postgraduate studies in Market and Behavior in the 21st Century, advised by Luiz Felipe Pondé at FAAP, and also in his work as a professor at Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie, in postgraduate courses on artificial intelligence applied to architecture. This investigation flows into pieces and projects that reflect the spirit of the time. By analyzing the changes in the relationships between people, objects and spaces, Jeferson proposes an emotionally intelligent architecture, one that translates the contemporary way of inhabiting, working and feeling.
Among his recurring themes are the tension between nature and technology, tropical maximalism and Latin retrofuturism, which the architect understands as legitimate expressions of a generation that seeks authenticity and representation in the spaces it occupies. Tropical exuberance, reinterpreted with geometric rigor and constructive precision, appears as a signature in his projects.
The work of Jeferson Branco is driven by stories born from attentive observation of the world and from the belief that architecture and design are tools of narrative, identity and cultural transformation through forms, colours and textures.