THE STUDIO
Architecture and design studio. Phase 4, DHA, Lahore. In practice since 2012.
SMA+Design
Architecture · Design
Lahore, Pakistan
Light, Space, and Mass. The three forces through which a building earns its place.
SMA+Design is an architecture and design studio in Phase 4, DHA Lahore. Founded by Salman Mirza in 2013, the studio works on homes, commercial spaces, and industrial buildings. The attention to detail stays the same whether the project is an 18,000 square foot house or a single piece of furniture.
The design is done on paper. Pen, paper, and physical models are how a building gets thought through: drawn, discussed, argued over, torn up and drawn again, through many more iterations than a client ever sees. A pen keeps pace with thinking in a way software does not. You put an idea down and can stand back and look at it in the same moment, and for an architect the hand and the mind are somehow in sync. Revit comes afterwards, as a production tool: it documents what has already been decided and holds it to a tolerance the site can be judged against. Clients see realistic visualizations, not technical drawings, because it is unfair to ask someone to inhabit a building they can only read as a drawing. If what gets built differs from what was drawn, the studio treats that as its own failure, not a normal part of construction.
The studio runs two teams side by side: a design team and a build team. This exists for one reason: so the detail designed in the studio is the detail that gets built.
How We Work
Five principles the studio holds to on every project, whatever its size.
LISTEN
Understand the brief beyond the brief. What does the client need that they have not said yet? What does the site demand? The project does not begin until these questions are answered.
DRAW
The design is done on paper. Drawn, argued over, torn up and drawn again, through many more iterations than a client ever sees. A pen keeps pace with thinking in a way software does not: you put an idea down and look back at it in the same moment. For an architect the hand and the mind are in sync.
SHOW
Clients see visualizations, not technical drawings. It is unfair to ask someone to inhabit a building they cannot read. Every design stage is shown, not decoded.
RESOLVE
Physical models and 3D prints are made at critical junctions. Not as presentation tools, but as thinking tools. The hand that builds a model finds problems the eye looking at a screen misses.
BUILD
Revit turns the resolved design into a production set: every junction documented to a tolerance the site can be held to. The build team executes against the same level of detail the design team produced. Two parallel teams, one standard. The gap between drawing and building is treated as a failure of process, not an inevitability of construction.
SERVICES CAPABILITIES
The studio is in DD Commercial Market, Phase 4, DHA. Visits are by appointment — the best projects start with a conversation over tea.
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