Melissa Smith
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Melissa Smith

Adjunct Sr.Assistant Professor
Programs
  • banduksmithstudio.in
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About 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 co-founded. Her research interests follow how inhabitants tend to restructure their built environments over time, with an eye toward how these unplanned, recurring interventions could inform design processes for the public realm.
Melissa completed Master of Architecture and Master of City & Regional Planning degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, USA, where she was a John K. Branner Fellow in 2010. She completed her BA with concentrations in German, Asian Studies and Art History from Calvin College, Michigan, USA. She was the inaugural Program Chair for the Bachelor of Urban Design program at at CEPT University, Ahmedabad, and teaches in the Architecture and Planning faculties there. Her interests, explored through the investigation of the incremental, unplanned transformation of aging modernist planned cities, and continued through the examination of settlement formation in India, follow how inhabitants tend to restructure their built environments over time, with an eye toward how these unplanned, recurring interventions could inform design processes for the public realm.
  • pedagogy
  • climate responsive design
  • informal urbanism
  • architectural modernism
  • urban morphology
  • mapping & representation
  • urban design
  • HRW8c- Architecture and the City — S‑2026
  • DRP — S‑2026
  • Project Criticism: Methods of Participation — S‑2025
  • Beating the Urban Heat — S‑2025
  • DRP — S‑2025
  • DRP — M‑2025
  • Resilience Thrift — Repairing for Climate Change — M‑2025
  • Resilience Thrift: Design Build Retrofits for Informal Ahmedabad — W‑2025

Book Chapter

  1. BandukSmith Studio Architectures of Transition: Emerging Practices in South Asia
  2. The Advance of the Booth Markets: Local Entrepreneurs and Commercial Development in Chandigarh Envisioning the Indian City: Spaces of Encounter in Goa, CalcuAa, Pondicherry, and Chandigarh
  3. We move the ground

Conference

  1. Boundary Walls: Territorial Negotiation in the Indian City Society of Architectural Historians Annual International Conference
  2. Resilience Thrift: Retrofit Strategies for Climate Resilience in Irregular Settlements INTA Climate Justice and Resilience

Journal

  1. Competing Visions for Ahmedabad’s Talavs Lifelines: Reimagining Infrastructures between Cultures and Construction
  2. Mapping Strategies for Urban Design The Onion Project

Conference Proceedings

  1. Resilience Thrift: Retrofit Strategies for Climate Resilience in Irregular Settlements INTA Climate Justice and Resilience
  2. Blacksmith Caravans on the move.
  3. Deeper Daylight: anidolic devices in Delhi office buildings. Indian Architect & Builder
  4. Light and Colour in open plan offices. Indian Architect & Builder
  5. SID 25 curriculum exposition: building energy efficiency. Ahmedabad, India: SID Research Cell.
  6. SID 25 curriculum exposition: history, theory, criticism, and technology. Ahmedabad, India: SID Research Cell
  7. Visual Comfort: when daylight and artificial light mix. Indian Architect & Builder
  8. Architecture of Imperfect Translations
  9. Commercial Courtyards: a delicate balance. Indian Architect & Builder
  10. Pol House Performance: a thermal analysis of three Ahmedabad pol houses. Indian Architect & Builder
  11. The Stone Jaali: a critical inquiry into daylight performance. Indian Architect & Builder
  12. The Tree Effect: a few trees’ power to pull down temperatures in the Gandhinagar CBD. Indian Architect & Builder

Journal Article

  1. Aging Modernism: Incremental evolution in self-correcting cities and the importance of everyday architectural a