Sumayya Vally

Architect Sumayya Vally Puts People First

By Bonnie Langedijk

To call Sumayya Vally an architect seems too simple of a statement. The founder and principal of Johannesburg- and London-based architecture and research practice Counterspace looks far beyond crafting aesthetically pleasing structures. Instead carefully considering and focusing on the social and cultural impact of design through reevaluating and rethinking the traditional structures within which we live and create. 

Through her deeply considerate yet radical approach to design, Vally has become one of the leading architects of our time. At 30, she became the youngest architect commissioned for the internationally renowned Serpentine Pavilion in London. Beyond the pink and brown structure, her collaboration with the London-based gallery included the inception of the Support Structures for Support Structures fellowship program, aimed at empowering artists and collectives working at the intersection of the arts, social justice, and ecology. But Vally’s career spans far beyond that singular – yet major – achievement. The architect and founder is also a TIME100 Next List honouree, on the Board of Directors at the World Monuments Fund, and held the role of Artistic Director of the inaugural Islamic Arts Biennale (January - May 2023) in Jeddah – and with it reimagining the definition of Islamic art – to name a few. But we’ll let Sumayya do the talking.

Bonnie: The term architecture is thrown around a lot, but there are many different ways of defining it. What’s yours?

Sumayya: It's going to sound grand, but it's very simple and very complex at the same time. Architects orchestrate the spaces and the world that we move through and move in. Architecture is a manifestation of the forms of living and the forms of life that we have, which is why it's so incredibly powerful because all of us are born into architecture. It's something that we have an understanding of in our subconscious. It's speaking to us about who we are daily. I understand how, especially as a South African, it affirms our place in the world. It tells us what dignities we deserve or are given by the world. It tells us how the world sees us and what our position in the world is, which is why spaces for public engagement that have dignity, service, infrastructure, and beauty are so important. It's becoming a part of our identity without us even realizing it.

Many of the things that exist in the world today have been created through this very singular, often, western lens. It makes you question who gets to create in this world we live in, what stories are represented in that world? You could say your heritage is quite fragmented and very rich with many different influences. How do you think that impacts how you're able to think outside of the boxes that many of us create within? And how has it shaped your philosophy of spaces and how they should function?

Sumayya: I don't know if it's fragmented as much as it's simultaneous.

“Architects ORCHESTRATE the spaces and the world that we move through and move in. Architecture is a manifestation of the forms of living and the forms of life that we have, which is why it's so incredibly powerful because all of us are born into architecture.”

That's a better way of putting it.

Sumayya: There’s a lot of power in always being on the inside and the outside of things.

I agree.

Sumayya: I find this in so many different conditions that I work in. When I work in the Middle East, I'm Muslim – and of course, so much of my cultural practice is shaped by that – but I'm not Arabic speaking and I'm also not Arab. In South Asia, I'm ethnically and culturally Indian Pre-Partition boundaries but I didn't grow up there, and my family is diasporic. In South Africa, my family came as migrants. I fully identify and feel a hundred percent South African. But there is also a complication, not in how I see myself or how South Africans see me, but in how people from outside of South Africa see me. There’s a power in having the literacy to be able to understand nuances in all of these contexts and conditions and languages around how different places operate. To have some kind of understanding but then to also be able to, because one is often on the outside of things, be able to see things from a zoomed-out perspective and to be able to see how different parts fit together or how systems work.

How a project functions – not just as a building, but in its whole life from the making of the building to thinking like a curator about institutional partners or how programmatically a building is networked with other places and other things – is something very important for me. I think that's something that comes from being diasporic. My Serpentine Pavilion, for example, had this diasporic method where it was about thinking about spaces that were important for migrant communities when they first came to London. Some of the first mosques, African churches, synagogues, marketplaces for traditional ingredients, cinemas where someone could hear something in their mother tongue, et cetera. I wanted to bring those to a place that can be considered a center of London but then also kind of fold back out into the city, into these community institutions in the form of these small fragments of the pavilion where we had programs that I worked on with the Serpentine and these community institutions, like the series of reading sessions with authors at New Beacon books. That logic of working with something that is networked across a place, but also where architecturally there is a relationship between host and home where they start to alter each other, is something that subconsciously, perhaps came from this way of being that is about moving through different cultures simultaneously. Thinking about architecture as being relational across geography is something that's very much present in my work and developed completely subconsciously. But I do think that there is something in there that comes from my DNA, as you say, of being from so many different conditions or being simultaneous.

What do you think are some of the most important fundamental questions we should ask ourselves when we are thinking about creating spaces? How can we rebuild them for connection rather than disconnection or keeping people apart?

Sumayya: Thinking about the legacy of the conditions we were operating in, is the first starting point for us. That varies from project to project, but it's also amazing to see how on a global scale so many things that happened in time have similar threads that cross between places. The second is, to think about the community we serve. But oftentimes that community is in the past and the future. We think about honoring our ancestors if there is some kind of story that wants to find fruition or aesthetic form that is not culturally presented. It needs to find a way to have continuity into the future. Architecture, for the most part, is a very enduring force so we think about it on those two trajectories. That’s how we can serve the present in the best way. Thinking about serving the present for the present that is now, is not always the best thing that we can do because the present we have now is unjust because of what has passed. Too often architecture is only focused on the immediate time condition. It perpetuates a world without realizing it's doing so. 

Interestingly, you touched on the concept of past, present, and future. When I look at your work, it's so much about creating a bridge between those three and connecting and respecting heritage and tradition with innovation. Would you agree? And what do you think are some of the lessons we can learn from the past that we can apply in a way now that helps us in the future? As a society, we can be so obsessed with newness and innovation, but I think there are some really beautiful things we can take from the past and reshuffle.

Sumayya: Architecture has been involved in traditional AI for a long time. Now that we're on the cusp of the era of generative AI, it's a question that’s coming up continuously in terms of what that means for the future of architecture. This is why I was saying it's so important to think about the past and the future simultaneously, because the AI capacities that we have right now are fueled on The Internet, a knowledge base that’s very particular. We don't have equitable archives of architectures of the past that are extremely futuristic and incredibly progressive, because we never examined and understood them carefully enough. That information is out there and some incredible scholars have written books about fractal architectural and city-based patterns in African societies, pre-colonization. There are of course incredible texts and literature about Timbuktu and the Grand Mosque of Djenné, and all of these methods of building with the earth in a very renewable way that also continues cultural legacies, where an entire community is involved in the rebuilding. Those ways of being, even though there is some study around them, they're very underrepresented in The Internet of Things in comparison to other knowledge bodies. If we only continue on that present trajectory, it means that with AI, we're going to further that divide instead of working to be able to undo it or supplement it differently. There are an infinite number of things that we can learn from other ways of being and from society's past. 

Absolutely.

Sumayya: At last year's Venice Biennale for Architecture, there was a project presented by Forensic Architecture that illustrated a point that I am continuously trying to make, where they looked at this hypothesis from Ukraine or the region that is now Ukraine. It's one of the most important bread baskets in Europe. The hypothesis said that around 6,000 years ago when civilizations built in this part of the world, they built in a way that their foundations made the soil more fertile. Not only did it make the soil more fertile in that time, still 6,000 years later, there is that same enzyme in the soil that has allowed the soil to remain fertile. Oftentimes when architects talk about sustainability, they say that the most sustainable thing we can do is sometimes not to build. But that understanding is because our understanding of the world is so tied to this current colonial capitalist model, that we can't understand that an entirely different way of being is possible that listens to the seasons. That isn’t only about being zero carbon or net energy or whatever, but can be generative in its making if we can create systems that are not just about negating the problems we have, but about looking at the question completely differently. So many societies past have had this attention to the earth and there are interconnections between so many indigenous bodies of knowledge all over the world, from Africa to Polynesia to Pre-Enlightenment Western Europe, to Eastern Europe. The sensibilities are often so much in sync. Even if perhaps these civilizations never met, they had the same instincts.

Asking those sorts of questions also protects some of that cultural identity. A lot of new buildings, when you look at cities, especially capitalist, wealthier cities, they all start to look the same. And it's such a shame because every country has its own identity and its roots and reasons for how their culture exists. We end up with a monoculture when we don't ask these types of questions.

Sumayya: I often say that there are two ways of making architecture. One is about being in dialogue with a place. Spending time with a place, learning about its culture, and its people, being in dialogue with it, and working actively to understand it. Then when one makes a piece of architecture, that piece of architecture is coming from that listening. The other way of making architecture is where one comes up with one's own style and aesthetic and ideal, and then projects that form onto a place. Sometimes the world of architecture also works a little bit like that; a superpower architect comes to a place and then projects their style on a context that has so much nuance. It's not only the flaw of this architect, it's also the way that this capitalist model works. The time allocated to being able to research and conceptualize the value that we attribute to that form of thinking and listening versus the value that we attach to the production of an image. All of these things contribute to that model and are furthering the project of making everything look the same, because the faster it becomes, the more capitalistic it becomes, also the deeper that divide starts to become between culture and and built form.

Speed becomes the main driving force.

Sumayya: Yes, and the return on investment.

Is there a specific feeling or emotion that you hope to evoke in those who experience your work? 

Sumayya: I think it's something that happens. In the design process, we're often thinking about how to quieten down and provide a tranquil space yet that doesn't involve doing nothing. It in fact involves doing a lot. I believe in a strong architectural statement that almost works to quieten all the noise around it down and frame views in particular ways and highlight the sky or a quality of light in a particular way. But the exact sentiment when a project is complete is always a surprise. I believe that the energy we have when we design a project and that we pour into it is like magic. That's for me also a responsibility to hold. It's a responsibility in terms of the kinds of work that we choose to take on because we have to be able to honor those opportunities so that people do feel that sentiment when they're in the project.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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