Imagining Worlds: Counterspace's Sumayya Vally on Optimism, Courage, and the Architecture Waiting to be Made
Sumayya Vally by Lou Jasmine
By Julia Gamolina
Sumayya Vally is the principal of Counterspace, architect of the 2021 Serpentine Pavilion, and Artistic Director of the inaugural Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah. A TIME100 Next list honoree, World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, and Dezeen’s Emerging Architect of the Year 2023, Vally has been identified as someone who will shape the future of architectural practice and pedagogy. She is Honorary Professor of Practice at The Bartlett School of Architecture and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada.
JG: Tell me about your foundational years — where did you grow up and what did you like to do as a kid?
SV: I was born in February 1990, in an Apartheid-designated Indian-only township called Laudium, in South Africa, and just four days after Nelson Mandela was released from prison. Here, I was raised in a close-knit community, where faith-based practice and community initiatives played an important role in daily life. I grew up in an incredible time of South Africa’s optimism; I was four years old when the democracy we fought into being had started. I was not quite of the “born-free” generation but very much raised on the cusp of it, brought into a world in which Archbishop Tutu coined the term Rainbow Nation, and raised in the spirit of Ubuntu which translates to, “I am because you are.”
I spent much of my childhood in my grandfather’s stores on Ntemi Piliso Street in the heart of Johannesburg. Many South Africans don’t have the opportunity to interact with worlds outside of their own — spaces were, and still are, very much segregated. I think that walking the streets in the city — especially walking to the Joburg Library — let me into worlds that I wouldn’t have seen otherwise. Architecture came to me through the city and through fiction. I’ve always had an interest in finding and creating worlds, and in seeing what I truly consider architecture — the fabric of the city — as interesting starting points from which to imagine. It's very gradual, but I always had this desire to have a practice that brings together different parts of the city into the same world.
Sumayya Vally's Serpentine Pavilion, 2021. Courtesy Iwan Baan
Dhaka Art Summit 2023. Photo by Shadman Sakib.
How did you choose where you studied architecture?
I studied at the University of Pretoria and completed my Masters at the University of Witwatersrand, which are both in my home province of Gauteng. I wanted proximity to home and to the cities that shaped my understanding and appreciation of space, as well as the possibilities and opportunities that exist in a community.
I don't quite know when I decided to become an architect. I think I wanted to be many different things; I was really interested in history and writing, and I remember wanting to be a journalist and an archaeologist as well. When I think about the way that I practice architecture, I think that many of these different interests have found their way into my approach.
Tell me about Counterspace — why you started it, how it has evolved over the years. What are you focused on these days?
Counterspace was born out of a desire to create a different canon and to be able to find what we felt we were missing in our architectural education. Throughout our university education, my friends and I failed to see our own contexts reflected in the curriculum, so the express intention of Counterspace has always been to “fix” this through pedagogy and practice. My practice was formed by both the challenges and the inspirations that exist in my city. Johannesburg is a place with deep segregation, but also a place that is incredibly vibrant and full of creativity. We initially started as a collective, but over the years people have gone on to explore individual pursuits. However, that collective spirit very much persists in all the work we do.
The practice in its current form occupies a space between the functional and the speculative, pedagogy, and praxis. We simultaneously describe cities and their histories, and imagine them and their futures. Inspired by its location, Johannesburg, Counterspace is committed to developing design forms that are specific to the continent, through design research, publishing, pedagogy, built things, buildings, and other forms of architecture. Our current projects are focused on expressions of African and Islamic hybrid identities, which are very much both rooted and diasporic.
“Right now, I feel that the work of expressing hybrid identities into methods of practice is most urgent. These imaginations offer different visions and questions for our world; without merely negating colonial worlds, they embody different ones.”
Looking back at it all, what have been the biggest challenges? How do you both manage through perceived disappointments or setbacks?
I am lucky that I have always been buoyed by a firm belief that there is always reason for hope and optimism. Dreaming takes courage, but it is everything. There are so many untold stories, undreamt dreams, and unmade worlds waiting to be told.
What have you also learned in the last six months?
We are reminded that information war is the war of our time — even when history is right there, it is being denied and erased before our eyes. All of us have the responsibility to honor history in our work. I have also been learning a lot about what is valued. Creativity is the most necessary tool for imagining worlds, yet it is the most exploited.
What are you new to, and curious about, right now?
On a recent visit to India, I visited the Indian city of Nagaur which is probably best remembered for its celebrated townsman, Abü’l-Fadl b. Mubarak, the author of the Atn-i Akbari and the Akbar-nama. The city is also remembered for its Sufi shaikhs of the Chishti, Qädiri, and Suhrawardi schools. The desert terrain of the Central Rajasthan town was and remains the center of a district that includes several historic towns such as Didwana, Khatu, Ladnun, and Naraina.
Nagaur was one of the oldest strongholds of Muslim India, and the town and its surrounding district preserve a great number of sultanate monuments that display a distinctive local architectural style. They date from the 13th century to the time of the establishment of the Mughal empire there in the 16th century, and many of the monuments are located in Nagaur itself. The other towns of the district, in particular Naraina and Khat, are also enriched with sultanate buildings, some of considerable architectural value.
The sultanate architecture of Nagaur has not yet attracted the attention it deserves. The standard works on Indo-Islamic architecture always virtually ignore Nagaur.
While on a recent site visit for an upcoming project in Benin City, Nigeria, I visited the last standing building of the Benin Kingdom, which had been razed to the ground by the British colonial forces.
It was fascinating to see these vernacular architectural features within the palace walls. Fluted walls inside and out, then a marker of royal homes and a symbol or social rank. Walls were built in layers in city houses, with an average thickness of 0.6 - 1 meter, not exceeding four layers, though the Oba’s Palace walls were five layers. While these fluted walls were a decorative feature, they also served a heat insulation function. Doorways are generally rectangular and without doors, providing pleasant effects of light and shade through the palace.
There is so much to be learned from “alternative” architectures. I think for the most part, vernacular architectures are far more contemporary than the architectures that adorn cities. In the rich conditions of our cities — in the rituals of peoples’ lives and in how the city functions, in everything that happens despite buildings in our context, and the clues in mythologies and fractals and belief systems in our vernacular architectures — contemporary architecture is waiting to be made.
Islamic Arts Biennale. Scenography by OMA. Artistically directed by Sumayya Vally. Copyright Marco Cappalletti, courtesy of OMA.
Who are you admiring now and why?
I have the greatest admiration for history’s forgotten figures who have done the important work without recognition for decades. One of these monumental figures is Paul Panda Farnana, the Congolese horticulturalist, academic, and activist on which one of our upcoming projects is based. He studied horticulture in the town, passed with distinction, and his research made a contribution to what the landscape of Belgium looks like. He also worked in the Congo, with the landscape there, and he was a political advocate, fighting in the war for Belgium. Yet, he experienced first-hand discrimination and violence towards Black people, even though they were fighting for the country that was now their home. After that, he started to speak up about this discrimination and organized Pan-African and liberation conferences all over Europe. With Du Bois and several others, he advocated for the wages of Black people to be more fair, and he took the story of the discrimination and unfair treatment around the world as far as he could. Very sadly, he was poisoned and assassinated at the end of his life. I felt very inspired by the story of this person who I’d never heard of, and wanted to create a project that honors his life and his legacy, while also honoring the legacies of thousands of people who are unnamed and unknown.
“I believe that if we look deeply at our own context, we will find new architectures waiting to happen.”
What is the impact you’d like to have on the world? What is your core mission?
I am really interested in the future of cultural typologies. I'm interested in thinking about how perspectives of difference can influence the cultural forms that we have from museums and libraries to archives, traditional and non-traditional. The desire to think about other forms of archive, and other ways of holding knowledge, has always been embedded in my work, whether that’s in a lived space or in land. Land is also an archive. Dust. Recipes. Songs and stories. We really have the opportunity and the potential to think about these things differently from our contexts and that's something I'm passionate about. Translated into form, these languages will push architecture forward differently.
And what does success in that look like to you?
I think there is too much work to be done now — in the present — to be concerned with typical notions of “success.” I am often frustrated with our generation’s focus and fascination with success rather than with the urgent attention to the work we need to do. Right now, I feel that the work of expressing hybrid identities into methods of practice is most urgent. These imaginations offer different visions and questions for our world; without merely negating colonial worlds, they embody different ones.
Considering the urgency of the work, and how short life is, I feel like I have so much to do. And for a long time in my making of this practice, it felt like screaming into a vacuum for me as many people questioned the relevance of these ideas in the architectural realm and questioned their ability to translate into form or anything with effects. I'm incredibly honored by the recent recognition, but I think it's important to acknowledge that when we have more visibility, it means that it gives others the confidence to be able to participate and engage in work from their own perspectives. I still feel this constant urgency for this work that still needs to be done.
Asiat-Darse Bridge, Vilvoorde, Belgium. Courtesy Counterspace.
Rainforest Pavilion - a gathering space for outdoor public sculpture. Courtesy Counterspace.
Finally, what advice do you have for those starting their career? Would you have any additional or different advice for women?
Don’t ever listen to anyone who tells you that anything you can imagine has already been done. There is an infinite number of untold stories and undreamt worlds waiting to happen from your unique voice and your unique perspective.
As a young architect in Africa, I think it is important to work in many speeds and many streams simultaneously, and toward the project of finding and forging African design languages. We need to be working at the slow pace of a generational project — researching, finding, and forging the archive — but also at the gutsy pace of making things happen very quickly. I believe that if we look deeply at our own context, we will find new architectures waiting to happen.