This year’s Serpentine Pavilion is looking beyond its leafy spot in Kensington Gardens, in one of London’s most exclusive neighborhoods, to present a wider view of the city. The 20th edition of the hotly anticipated annual architectural pop-up is under the wing of Johannesburg design practice Counterspace, directed by Sumayya Vally.

The studio’s creation is an amalgam of built forms found in some of London’s gathering spaces with rich stories to tell about Black culture, migrant communities, and fading traditions, places like the Four Aces Club, one of the first venues to play Black music in the United Kingdom, and the East London Mosque, one of the first in the country to be allowed to use loud speakers to broadcast calls to prayer.

Under a uniting circular roof, wide pillars frame a jumble of blocks and small seating platforms modeled on architectural elements from the studio’s sites of interest. It’s a jarring mix of hybrid forms finished in contrasting micro-cement and cork textures.

If it sounds chaotic, that’s the point. Vally’s young, research-based studio works by mapping the life of a city through such places, photographing them, documenting demographics, and collecting hyper-local artifacts. The pavilion’s design suggests London’s complexity and the friction of paths crossing and crashing into one another. Four smaller Fragments of the Pavilion have also been temporarily installed in locations that inspired Vally’s design to honor those communities.

Intended for 2020, Counterspace’s pavilion was delayed a year by the pandemic. Vally had to keep her collaborations stoked from afar, but she’s excited to now be back in London, where she tells us about the significance of the pavilion in more detail.

This pavilion is more of an ongoing event than a finished built work. Can you explain how that ties into how you see architecture?

Architecture is about constructing spaces and situations. Of course, that involves the built realm, but there are other ways to understand it, too. Ritual, atmosphere, and even forms of dress are essential parts of how a space is constructed. I’ve always been really interested in how we can work with those other ingredients and in the construction of situations beyond just what is built.

But thinking of my own Indian heritage, or South Africa, or the Global South generally, many ways of being have been ravaged. Many traditions have not been allowed to continue in the directions they may have taken because of others that were imposed. So I imagine how they can reemerge, alongside the architecture that we have now, as something more hybrid that brings together lots of influences. I see Johannesburg as a place where that happens without architects, and I’m interested in what architects can do with that going forward.

What can other countries learn from the specifics of Johannesburg and the area that you’ve been working in?

I’m someone very rooted in Joburg. Coming to London and thinking about what my position is and what I have to say about it has been challenging. But something that Joburg has given me is a way to read things that are happening beneath the surface of the city. So much happens despite the formal city, but architects have been trained to be blind to that. In most schools we study architecture in a very traditional sense, and when we leave and look around, we see only the city’s formal fabric.

“Ritual, atmosphere, and even forms of dress are essential parts of how a space is constructed.”
—Sumayya Vally

In London my research was about finding places that had been erased or don’t exist anymore. Because when those neighborhoods were developed or gentrified, these small hole-in-the-wall or ordinary places were not understood as important community centers. Places did not develop with them; they developed despite them.That’s something I encounter in Joburg all the time—and, because of our history, often in a particularly violent way. I think that phenomenon exists in most cities.

Were there any specific places you were moved by in the course of your research?

I looked at spaces like the head quarters of the West Indian Gazette, which Claudia Jones founded in Brixton above a records hop, and the Mangrove, a West Indian restaurant that I think has become a lot more known because of artist/director Steve McQueen’s 2020 BBC series Small Axe. It was the unofficial headquarters for the Notting Hill Carnival and for so many movements.

Do you think institutions are finally recognizing more voices? Or do you think they are paying lip service to the idea, given the year we’ve had talking about race and inequality?

I’ve thought about this so much. I’m so moved that my practice was chosen before the moment of reckoning that we’ve had. I’ve really been taken by how many of the ideas the Serpentine has acted on. It’s been a privilege to become part of something different that this commission has brought.

Of course, there is a lot of pressure on institutions to be seen to be speaking from diverse perspectives. I think it’s something we should be aware of in general. Being in this position now, you also just have to take the opportunity to hold what this moment is bringing. And move that work forward into the future.

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