Corrective Design

There is a marked tenderness, tempered with a discerning criticality, when Sumayya Vally speaks of Johannesburg, her hometown that she credits as her greatest source of inspiration. Of note is the beautiful, if unusual, quality of distinctly iridescent light. As is the diverse nexus of communities, traditions, identities, and forms of cultural expression. “It’s architecture waiting to happen,” she says. “In Johannesburg, we say that there are two ingredients for a gathering: barbeque smoke and music. That is also architecture, in a way—something that brings people together in space, to commune, to share, to cross cultures, boundaries, and borders.”

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These many dimensions of beauty exist in Vally’s Johannesburg, at once, in spite of, alongside, and as a consequence of its dark colonial past. The shimmering light, for one, is thought to be caused by reflections of pigmented mineral dust, a toxic byproduct of intensive mining. Laudium, the Indian-only township near Pretoria, where Vally was born in 1990 just four days after Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, was “an ethnic enclave designed by apartheid, of course,” the architect reflects. “But it was also a stronghold for people who stand together in solidarity.” The small but tight-knit community included prominent anti-apartheid activists, among them human-rights lawyer and judge Jody Kollapen and journalist Yusuf Abramjee.

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Hybrid identities, migration, and contested space are a few of the terms that Vally, a third-generation Indian-South African of Islamic faith, often uses to describe the layers of social and historical context that inform her collaborative, research-led approach. “With how didactic, polarized, and binary things are becoming,” she says, “we don’t have enough room for the hybridity and ambiguity that allow us to resonate across contexts, cultures, and points of common understanding for shared histories.”

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Vally established her architecture and research studio Counterspace in 2015, shortly after she completed her master’s degree at the University of Witwatersrand, and began teaching at the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg, a department founded by Lesley Lokko. The Ghanaian-Scottish architect had seen Vally’s graduate exhibition, which centered on social archives and overlooked histories, and hired her on the spot. “I was very frustrated by the canon we received,” reflects Vally. With Lokko, she connected immediately, and for five years, Vally co-taught and later led a teaching unit, An African Almanac, which set out to create a new curriculum and actively reimagine a body of knowledge that decentered the Eurocentric perspective.

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The architect’s recent design for the Asiat-Darse pedestrian bridge in Vilvoorde, Belgium is an apt application of this thinking put into practice. Vally and her team developed the concept, conceived as an undulating link of canoe-like forms over a former industrial canal, as an homage to Congolese agriculturist Paul Panda Farnana, a little-known but significant local figure and activist who Vally’s team learned of in their deep research.

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Beyond such works in the built environment, which provide an everyday monument to untold histories, Vally describes pavilions, biennials, and pedagogical sites as safe spaces to experiment with ideas for the future. “We never get to imagine the world anew if we are only problem-solving in the now,” she offers.

“Imagination is an
exceptionally political tool,
and beauty is the most political thing in the world as an expression of who we are."
 — Sumayva Vally

Often, her projects incorporate elements of performance, installation, ritual, and memory with a deeply humanist sense of urgency. In 2020, Vally became the youngest architect to be commissioned for the annual Serpentine Pavilion in London, for which she addressed erasure and paid homage to the city’s diasporic communities and gathering places, both present and past, using architecture as a potent expression of belonging and memory.

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A year later, at the 2021 Istanbul Design Biennial, Vally presented culinary dishes as a form of material history. In the example of koshari, an Egyptian national dish that includes ingredients from several cuisines, Vally sees the poetic arrival of “homesick Indian soldiers of the British Raj, who had lentils in their pockets,” she says. She has previously described making samosas with her grandmother as the first architecture she has ever built, an anecdote that brings a smile to her face. “I was being a little bit cheeky with the idea of an architectural model, and the reverence that we have for the ways that we make,” she says. “There are so many ways of making.”

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At the 2023 Dhaka Art Summit, held in Bangladesh, Vally enacted rain-making rituals that steadily dissolved and washed away a pavilion made from unfired clay vessels over the course of its installation—a gesture showing the beauty in cultural acts that persist long after a physical structure has eroded with time. In her role as the artistic director and curator of the first-ever Islamic Arts Biennale, held last year in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Vally chose the Western Hajj Terminal at the King Abdulaziz Airport as its venue. It was an apt space for multifaceted cultural exchange at a major hub for travelers on pilgrimage to Islamic holy sites.

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At present, Counterspace has active projects in Manchester, England; Benin City, Nigeria; Nairobi and Kakuma in Kenya; and potentially Bahrain and Uzbekistan; as well as in her native Johannesburg. All of which, in addition to the calendar of talks and conferences, keep Vally’s suitcase perpetually half-packed. On the Monday afternoon when we speak, Vally has just returned to London from a research trip to Riyadh and Dubai, with another due to Boston before the end of the week, a few days before Ramadan. “I really do believe in the value of being grounded in a place, being immersed in a culture so that we can respectfully work from a place of understanding,” she says.

Prescient in her mind, too, are the territories that remain contested and embattled—specifically in Palestine, where it has become unbearable to witness the campaign of domicide and collective punishment, live-streamed in real time. “We really are a community that stands up and galvanizes in support of other communities under siege, because we have that embedded within us, a genetic memory of what it means to live under oppressive conditions,” says Vally, who was back home in South Africa earlier this year, as the country presented its lawsuit against Israel in the International Court of Justice.

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“Imagination is an exceptionally political tool, and beauty is the most political thing in the world as an expression of who we are. There are forces that don’t want that expression to be present, that want to erase those forms of beauty and cultures,” Vally says. “It’s important to remember that those forms are also political. Our work to imagine the world differently, and to bring about beauty, should also include thinking through these challenges. Nothing should be willful, incidental, or acontextual."

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Photo Assistant BELLA GALLIANO.