Melissa Smith

Melissa Smith is an architect and urban planner based in Ahmedabad, India, and part of banduksmithstudio, an architecture, urban design, and research practice that she founded with Sachin Bandukwala. Their work engages processes of making through research on unique construction methods, both institutionalized and inventive, and built projects that explore the boundaries of material and craft in the context of contemporary Indian construction. Melissa holds Master of Architecture and Master of City & Regional Planning degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, where she was a John K. Branner Fellow in 2010, and investigated the incremental, unplanned transformation of aging modernist planned cities in a project that included Chandigarh, Brasilia and New Belgrade, as well as several other mid-twentieth century cities around Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America Her research interests are interdisciplinary, and generally follow how inhabitants tend to restructure their built environments over time. This has led her to explore associated fields in architecture and planning, and she has written about research in building science, craft and construction, and incremental and cyclical processes of settlement formation. Her work has been published in North America, Europe, Australia and India, and as part of the Hong Kong and Venice Biennales. In Ahmedabad Melissa has been teaching in the Architecture and Planning Faculties at CEPT University since 2011, with courses focused on issues at the intersection of the architecture and planning fields. As Program Chair for the new undergraduate program Bachelor in Urban Design, Melissa both teaches and guides the program development.