Mel Schenck is an American architect, researcher, and writer living in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, focusing on Vietnamese architecture. His five decades of experience managing design and construction around the world inform his outlook on architecture and life.

Mel earned a Bachelor of Architecture degree at Montana State University in 1970 and a Master of Architecture degree at the University of California at Berkeley in 1981. He began his career managing construction contracts to Vietnamese constructors for the U.S. Navy in Saigon and southern Vietnam in 1971/1972, where he became enamored with the Vietnamese mid-century modernist architecture. After two decades managing architectural projects in America, Mel managed the operations of a 300-architect firm in San Francisco, with offices in Asia and Mexico as well as major cities in the United States. He returned to Vietnam in 2006 to direct master planning for a 325-hectare $1-billion resort community and two new towns in the Ho Chi Minh City metropolitan area.

He led a weekly seminar for ten years on architecture, planning, and history at the Huỳnh Tấn Phát Foundation in Ho Chi Minh City for university architecture and planning students, and is a member of the Society of Architectural Historians based in America.

Mel published his book Southern Vietnamese Modernist Architecture in 2020. A previous book entitled Changing World View: Impact on Architecture and the Design for an Urban Library was published in 1981. He is currently researching Vietnamese holistic architecture of the Information Age in preparation for a new book.