For Sumayya Vally, architecture goes beyond designing buildings. The Johannesburg-based architect, who’s appearing at two events at the upcoming Sydney Design Week, sees her practice through multiple prisms – migration, history, ritual, historically under-represented cultures and religion among them. Through her architecture and research practice Counterspace, which she founded with a group of friends in Johannesburg in 2015, she seeks to centre voices and cultures not traditionally seen or heard from in the field. And that includes those of her home town.

“When we were still in our master’s year of architecture school, I felt deeply … that there was so much that was so interesting – that is so interesting – about Johannesburg that I wasn’t necessarily seeing translated into professional practice, or translated into the curriculum,” Vally tells Broadsheet. “[Counterspace] wasn’t started with a big ambition per se, but we really started it as a space to pour our love for Johannesburg into.”

While Vally says she never imagined working outside of South Africa, her reach has extended far beyond her home country, and she’s now considered a leading young voice in global architecture. In 2020, at age 30, Vally became the youngest ever architect to take on the Serpentine Pavilion, a prestigious annual commission to design and install a temporary structure in London’s Kensington Gardens. In 2023 she was named Dezeen magazine’s emerging architect of the year. She’s also been listed on the Time 100 Next list and was the artistic director of the first Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Vally’s story, the beginnings of her own architectural language and the foundation of Counterspace lie in Johannesburg – but they also begin in pre-partition Gujarat, from where her grandfather migrated, as well as in her religion and others’ untold stories.

Experience Broadsheet in a new way. Join Broadsheet Access.

SIGN UP

“What I’m interested in, at its heart, is finding design form and design expression for our cultures and for place,” says Vally. “And that might be through a lens of home, or it might be through a lens of migration, or it might be through a lens of a historically under-represented or widely unknown story.”

An upcoming project – a footbridge over a canal in the small Belgian city of Vilvoorde – exemplifies this. Vally says she was initially hesitant to pitch for the commission, as she had no connection to the town. But her research uncovered a man named Paul Panda Farnana, the first person from what was then the Belgium-occupied Congo Free State to study in Belgium, specifically in Vilvoorde.

“It turns out he was a complete genius,” says Vally. After studying botany, Panda Farnana worked for the Belgian government but was later conscripted into the army. The violence and discrimination he experienced there turned him into a globally influential activist, and he was eventually assassinated. Vally had found her link; her pitch for the bridge reimagines what a bridge can be and is an homage to this extraordinary man: a series of Congolese-style boats conjoined over the river to form a bridge. Traditionally, when these boats were stacked on dry land, they became gathering places – a chief concern of Vally’s work.

Such placemaking is the subject of one of the two events Vally will take part in at Powerhouse’s Sydney Design Week. She’ll join Sara Mansour, poet and co-founder of Bankstown Poetry Slam, to discuss creating community and cultural places through design.

“Something that I’m trying to do is to think about cultural intelligences that different communities have in how they gather – for example, the stacking of the boats,” says Vally. “On the one hand, it’s on the architectural level to actually work with bodies of knowledge and intelligences, formally and in cultural artefacts, but also in ways that communities organise and in rituals that they perform. More often than not, there are a number of ingredients at play that make something that magic gathering space. And I think architects are trained to think about what those things are.”

Alongside Sunday Kitchen co-founder Karima Hazim, Vally will also co-host Recipes as Archives, a Sunday breakfast of traditional Lebanese recipes at Parramatta restaurant Baba Ghanouj (just across the road from the under-construction Powerhouse Parramatta museum).

Food and recipes have played an important role in Vally’s career. Using family recipes to document cultural shifts through migration and trade was the focus of a research project she conducted for the fifth Istanbul Design Biennale, looking at how food has travelled around the Mediterranean. Vally says her own history can be traced through recipes; she cites Indian dishes that are now only made outside of India because of how various groups were forced out of the country. Food is another powerful tool for placemaking – and while gathering over a meal is an age-old tradition, Vally is also interpreting it in other ways.

“I think that food and food architectures, like gathering architectures and so many ritual architectures, are really interesting drivers for form,” she says. “But also what they program and how they bring people together are really interesting catalysts for community.”

This article is produced by Broadsheet in partnership with Powerhouse. Sydney Design Week runs from September 13–19, 2024, with events across the city. Find the full program online.