Scaffold Episode 82: Sumayya Vally

The founder and principal of Counterspace reflects on the evolution of her practice in the wake both the 2021 Serpentine Pavilion and 2023 Islamic Arts Biennalle.

Sumayya Vally is a Muslim, South African architect, and the founder and principal of the architecture and research practice Counterspace.

“Architecture is abstract [...] and what I’m doing in my practice is making a concerted effort to find different sources for the origins of that abstraction. What has happened in the cannon, and in the profession more broadly is that we’ve inherited so much that we don’t deeply question. I think the languages that we’ve inherited could do with being supplemented or oven being overtaken, dare I say, by other origins, that come from different ways of being and different value systems.”

 

Listen to episode 82: Sumayya Vally now  

Scaffold is a podcast series featuring interviews with architects, artists and designers. Hosted by Matthew Blunderfield and produced by the Architecture Foundation, it is available on Apple PodcastsSpotify, and most major podcast streaming platforms.

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