South African Sumayya Vally, the youngest architect ever to win the Serpentine Pavilion commission in London, was floating on the fringes of the pavilion in Kensington Gardens ahead of its unveiling last month, elated to see visitors revel in the space.
“It has been marvellous to see people interacting with it as intended,” says Vally. “I had hoped that people would find these niches to sit in, that kids would climb up onto the pavilion from the outside. It is not a building with a back and front. It is meant to be inviting from every angle and there is seating that hugs the entire exterior and inside.”
Vally is principal architect of the Counterspace studio in Johannesburg, which was awarded the commission. Speaking via Zoom from London, where she is in an art residency, she says Johannesburg is her true creative home and that her work draws on the identities of people she has interacted with there. “The coexistence and resilience I experienced growing up in Johannesburg are in my design DNA,” she says.
Named the “World’s most influential architect shaping the future” in the 2021 Time100 list, Vally has been in London since May to work with community partners and art institutions in installing the “fragments” of her experimental design.
Breaking with tradition, Vally decentralised the concept of the pavilion through four “fragments” extending into London, which celebrate the places of gathering and belonging among migrant and diverse communities. “That was always at the heart of the concept and I think that’s why they chose it,” she says.
“Being from Joburg has played a big role in that. Joburg has given me the gift of the desire to read things beneath the surface and to look for the city that is under the formal city, or alongside and enmeshed with the formal city … I wanted to bring in this reading of the city and this desire to draw together lots of different histories.”
The Serpentine Pavilion is an invited competition and Vally’s vision joins a panoply of former luminaries such as Dame Zaha Hadid from the UK and Junya Ishigami from Japan.
Vally was 29 when she got the news that Counterspace had won the 20th Serpentine Pavilion commission, which has been extended for two years under the pandemic.
“I had just finished a meeting in Rosebank [Johannesburg] with a client collaborator and was walking to my car. I sat in my car and texted Counterspace. I was overjoyed.
“I also recognise the legacy that I am standing in, of all those great voices and an understanding that this is not about me. It has never been about me.”
Working with the co-custodians of the fragments has been very creative, exciting and fiery, says Vally.
“All the partners have very different outputs and all bring something different in terms of the realm of ideas, but they also overlap.”
Counterspace got the invitation in November 2019, pre-pandemic. Vally then flew to London and spent months researching places of meaning and resistance for migrant communities across the ancient city. The fabric of their lives and the context infused her novel concept.
The formal structure in Kensington Gardens is made out of recycled cork and entirely from salvaged steelwork and micro-cement derived from lime and waste, and hosts sound commissions by Ain Bailey and Jay Bernard, sharing the voices and sounds of communities and what they have lost, beyond its nonexistent walls.
Serpentine artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist says of Vally’s practice: “She uses research and archives to bring to the surface untold and silent stories through architecture.”
The fragments are intended to build solidarity of knowledge and support. Vally says: “They function almost as a network of islands across the city. They are about people talking to each other.”
She proposed a “support structures for support structures” fellowship for cultural producers, which has been developed and launched with the Serpentine civic project team.
One of two 2021 pavilion advisers, acclaimed architect and writer Lesley Lokko, says of Vally: “Her angle is always creative and imaginative … there is a kind of playfulness and joy but also a steely political undertone to it.”
Vally feels lucky to have had exposure to a close community and urban Joburg from a young age, influencing her design ethos.
“That part of the inner city is very diverse. I got to see, in the same realm, men in suits, women making vetkoek on the sides of the road, people selling samosas on their head and of course all the migrant store-owners. I’m interested in working with the resilience of people and their ways of being,” says Vally. “All of us are born into architecture. It shapes how we see ourselves.”
Even as a baby she was exposed to a wider world than Laudium, previously an Indians-only apartheid-designed township, where she attended the Pretoria (now Tshwane) Muslim School.
“My mother was from Johannesburg and my grandfather had a store in Ntemi Piliso Street, across from the Diamond Building, so I Iived in both those worlds: a small community life and the inner city,” says Vally, who would go there every holiday.
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