Growing up in an Indian-only apartheid township called Laudium in Johannesburg, South Africa, Sumayya Vally was surrounded by a strong community that contributed to her own identity and the philosophy behind her practice Counterspace Studio. “I’m very interested in working deeply with Johannesburg and in reading beneath its surface—the coexistence and resilience I experienced growing up in Johannesburg are in my design DNA,” she says.
In 2021, she became the youngest architect, at age 30, to be commissioned to design for London’s Serpentine Gallery. Now Vally has several projects in the works, including curating the first Islamic Arts Biennale in the iconic Hajj Terminal in Jeddah, as well as designing the presidential library for Liberia’s former president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first such venue to be dedicated to a woman. Here, she shares how her progressive and democratic design principles empower marginalized communities.
Did you always have a love for design?
I spent much of my childhood at my grandfather’s stores on Ntemi Piliso Street across from the Diamond Building in the heart of Joburg. Many South Africans didn’t (or still don’t) have the opportunity to interact with worlds outside of their own—spaces were (and still are) very much segregated. Walking the streets in the city—especially walking to the Joburg Library—let me into worlds that I wouldn’t have seen and experienced otherwise. It’s very gradual, but I always had this desire to work in the city and to have a practice that brings together different parts of the city into the same world.
What led you to launch Counterspace Studio in 2015, while you were still a student at the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Pretoria, both in South Africa?
Counterspace was born out of a desire to create a different canon and to be able to find what we were missing in our architectural education. I felt very deeply that there was a lack of response from architecture to what is actually happening in the city. I wanted to make work that counters these constructed narratives about ‘lack’ on the African continent. I believe that here, in the fringes and the margins, we can truly find what Johannesburg and African design languages can look like. Counter is not working from a place of anti but from a place of other with the idea and intent that there are multiple and myriad possibilities, realities, and worlds waiting to manifest themselves.
Created for Play Africa, a children’s museum in Johannesburg, the Children’s Courtroom comprises kid-sized furniture made from wood and blue metal elements
Your firm’s philosophy is centered on ‘designing from a place of difference.’ How does that inform your approach?
I’m in love with buildings and architecture, but there are so many other ways of spacemaking in other traditions that are not only focused on the static. Think of the many African ways of being—from ritual, dress, and adornment to sound. So much can be created without much physical infrastructure, which is why we need to supplement our inventory of design language to include new ways of seeing. The dominant Western narrative has taught us that ornamentation is a crime and that such forms of expression have no place in architecture. Even though I work within certain conventions, I also very much believe in privileging other modes of representation because our forms of articulation are limited. We can only see and think through what’s possible with the language we have to articulate it. Once we expand on that language, we can produce entirely different worlds.
In what ways does your work center communities that are often excluded from the conversation?
Everything I look at is through the lens of a fundamental interest in territory, identity, belonging, and trying to understand architecture beyond that which is built. My hope is that I get to work on many more cultural projects that are concerned with our narratives and with manifesting our identities and who we are. I’m interested in understanding how we can reconfigure these so that we bring about difference. Architecture is complicit in separating, othering, and excluding, but it can also be a force for the opposite. The architecture that moves me most is architecture that makes an offering about the human condition and has something to say about our relationships to each other and our relationships to territory and place.
This article originally appeared in HD’s September 2022 issue.
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