2 November 2022 |
Sumayya Vally was always going to stand out. The South African architect’s youth, gender, talent and unmistakable style make her impossible to ignore. She’s enjoyed meteoric success in the usually slow-burn, male-dominated, Northern Hemisphere-orientated world of architecture, but Vally insists it’s her outsider status that powers her practice. She designs from a place of difference, putting community and inclusion at the heart of her work. “African ways of space-making, or Southern (Hemisphere) ways of space-making,are so much about the oral and the atmospheric, about forms of dress and forms of ritual. So other disciplines naturally fall into space-making, which is quite different to a very Westernised, very traditional view of what architecture is,” she says.
Vally, 32, is Indian-South African and grew up in an apartheid township in Pretoria that was previously an Indian-only area. She recalls being surrounded by architecture which was synonymous with the state and colonisation. “Architecture was really employed as a device to segregate people and affirm their place in the world and in the city, whether that’s inferring a sense of superiority or inferiority. Of course, that happens everywhere, but in South Africa, it was particularly designed,” she says.
The buildings she saw every day were at odds with the spirit of the city she knew. “I often credit my love for architecture to my city, Johannesburg, which is this incredibly vibrant, creative, visually stimulating and very atmospheric place. It’s full of so many cultures coming together and so much diversity, especially in the inner city, where I spent a lot of my childhood.”Some of her most formative memories were of spending time in her grandfather’s fabric shop in central Johannesburg, which was piled high with Basotho Heritage Blankets. “When we goto architecture school, we get trained out of seeing all the stuff of the city and get trained into seeing only specific things as architecture,” she says. Her eyes have always been open to the things that traditional education can’t or won’t see.
A studious child, she spent a lot of time in the library – she considered going into journalism, archaeology and social sciences before settling on architecture because it was a discipline which could harbour all of her interests. “There’s this desire to imagine different worlds that is intrinsic to architecture. I’ve always been really interested in people and stories, and I guess in politics as well. I chose architecture because I really loved that. I believe so much in the value of being expressive through design and through aesthetics and the creation of space. But I hope that somehow in that interest, all these other interests are folded in.”
Vally launched her Counterspace practice in Johannesburg while she was still a student, partly as a reaction to the traditional approach she was expected to adopt. “I was told in architecture school that everything you can imagine has already been done by someone else. I think in a context like ours and in a context like fashion, too, that’s not true at all. It’s actually the furthest thing from the truth, because there are so many different ways of being and so many other world views, so many belief systems that we haven’t even begun to explore yet, or we haven’t listened to deeply enough.”
She was never going to wait for the architecture establishment to let her in. Instead, she forged ahead with her own vision and work practice. Her most impactful project in the UK to date has been the 2021 Serpentine Pavilion in Hyde Park. Vally is the youngest architect to receive the commission and wanted to create a space inspired by community centres, as well as a design that reverberated across London – far beyond the manicured lawns of the Serpentine Gallery. After it was taken down, four pieces of her pavilion, called Fragments, were sent to four community centres and gathering spaces in Finsbury Park, Deptford, Dagenham and Notting Hill. Of the latter, where she forged a particularly strong bond, the Fragments its at venue and community hub The Tabernacle: “We’re so interested and engaged in working with stories from across London. The little fragment at The Tabernacle is a stage set for a small recital or a little engagement.” The structure at the Serpentine is long since gone, but her Fragment still gets used every day by school and community groups, which is exactly what Vally intended. She’s also fascinated by sound system culture and is collaborating on a new project with the artist Alvaro Barrington to create a special sound system installation for Notting Hill Carnival.“My relationship with London over the last year has been wild and wonderful, and I’m completely in love with being here,”says Vally, who came to the city to work on the Serpentine project and stayed throughout the pandemic.
Vally looks majestic, with her hair wrapped in a turban, her eyes rimmed in kohl and her body swathed in architectural frills.“I do love drama and I really do love architecture,” she says of her preference for striking silhouettes. Her fashion choices are uniquely bold and strong, and she brings a sophisticated flair to the modest dressing expected of her Islamic faith. Alongside the influence of Johannesburg street style (“It’s like Afropunk everyday”), her community takes pride in dressing up for events and ceremonies. Vally also cites her mother and sister as her earliest fashion influences. “I had these incredible forces and figures in my life that were really elegant and graceful and forceful in how they put themselves together.”
She is a regular at London Fashion Week and boasts a wardrobe full of choice pieces from Harris Reed to Roksanda and Simone Rocha, whose clothes and accessories are among her favourites: “Simone is able to draw on different strands of identity and bring them into one thing to create something new.I enjoy wearing the clothes because they are intelligent and they tell a story. That’s also something I strive for in my architecture.”
Vally is drawn to the architecture she sees in other creative disciplines – including designers, writers and filmmakers –which then feeds into her own approach. “Arundhati Roy, she is an architect by training, but the way that she writes is like architecture. It’s putting together a world, then bringing it into being in some form. [The author] Octavia Butler is also incredibly inspirational and very formative for me and my work. The work of Sarah Malborough, a filmmaker, is really amazing – very spatial.”
And then there is the work of other female architects. “I’ve been hugely inspired by Zaha Hadid and Lina Bo Bardi,” she says, sharing with both women a forceful sense of style as well as a desire to reshape space. Musing on the challenges of being a female architect in the 21st century, she says, “In South Africa, we have a generation of incredible female architects, but the atmosphere of the profession is still very male.” Diversity, she argues, can only be a good thing and she is supercharged by her own sense of difference. “With all of the layers of my identity, I see that we’re not limited by who we are and we can be beyond those things. We can be beyond normative constructions of those things. I definitely think that all of my cultural lenses and my gender are a contribution to how I see the world.”
An architect’s job is to imagine the future of how we will live and how cities will evolve. What does Vally see? “A lot more diversity and a lot more hybridity,” she says. “I see plural and multiple forms of expression. I see cities that are completely hybrid in how they bring together many different cultural worlds and world views, but also things that are between the natural, between the high-rise and the suburb. I think that hybridity is a really interesting condition to work with. In so many other spaces, we are becoming more hybrid and expressing that hybridity. I hope that architecture follows and leads in that regard.” The world belongs to those who dare.
Top image: Sumayya Vally wears dress and shoes by VALENTINO. Taken from Issue 69 of 10 Magazine – PEACE, COURAGE, FREEDOM – out now. Purchase here.
BUILDING THE FUTURE
Photographer JOSHUA TARN
Fashion Editor and Talent SUMAYYA VALLY
Text CLAUDIA CROFT
Hair HIROSHI MATSUSHITA using Oribe Hair Care
Make-up NATSUMI NARITA
Fashion assistants BRITTANY NEWMAN and NINA CHENG
Digital operator JOE WILES
Special thanks to THE TABERNACLE, LONDON
