The 20th Serpentine Pavilion has just opened, after a year's postponement, and it has been well worth the wait. Designed by acclaimed architect Sumayya Vally, director of Johannesburg-based collaborative studio Counterspace, the Pavilion is a tribute to London’s hybrid identities with coexistence at its essence.

Serpentine Gallery’s annual commission showcases international architects who have not yet built structures in the UK with a focus on emerging and experimental talent such as Frida Escobedo of Mexico and Francis Kéré of Burkina Faso. Founded in 2015, Counterspace is the youngest studio to have been awarded this commission and yet this is only one of many major achievements Vally has accomplished in her career so far. Her accolades include being assistant curator for La Biennale di Venezia 2014 (South African Pavilion), being recently selected as a finalist for the Civitella Ranieri Foundation prize and becoming a TIME100 Next List honouree.

For this temporary structure, now open to all on Serpentine Gallery’s lawn in Kensington Gardens, Counterspace created a structure derived from past and present places of meeting, organising and belonging within London’s diverse communities, giving particular respect to neighborhoods occupied by migrant and diasporic populations. The shapes within the space are based on re-interpreting elements of markets, places of worship, cultural institutions and social venues, each shape becoming a piece in a larger puzzle and acting as an archive of London itself.

For the first time, the Pavilion also spreads across London with fragments placed in significant cultural locations that speak to the greater whole. There is a stage for The Tabernacle in Notting Hill, a podium for Vallance House Library in Dagenham, a shelf for New Beacon Books in Finsbury Park and a seat for The Albany in Deptford.

“Creating a way for the project to have a life after and outside of the Pavilion was incredibly important and is in fact integral to the project,” Vally explains. “The fragments around the city are there to honour the communities that surround them, and to plant seeds of collaboration that allow us to think about and build the future.”

Just as a building is not completed by its construction being finished, Counterspace demands us to focus on how a building is truly defined by how it is occupied by a community and their grounding and gathering rituals within it.

Counterspace was chosen because of its ability to draw on research, archives and collaboration to form new architectural languages that centre people and their needs. “I am interested in how architecture can begin to blend borders and absorb the atmospheric, the sonic, and the ritual,” Vally states. This inclusive and dynamic approach highlights how outdated mainstream architecture and its purpose has become. A building's duty should not to be ego or commerce. It should be to its people, to its place, to gathering time, to collecting narratives and housing them together, as Vally’s practice demonstrates.

As a child, Vally grew up in Laudium, an Indian-only township in Pretoria. The legacy of segregation and separation from the Apartheid-era filled her life with pockets of isolation and dislocation. “I got to experience worlds that would have otherwise not been exposed to me,” she says about time spent visiting her grandfather in inner-city Joburg. This is where she began her fascination with discovering the urban environment and understanding speculative histories. She started to read the city, to listen to it, to absorb it, and to love it, which ultimately shaped her studies and led to the interdisciplinary ideas that fuel Counterspace.

“With each new project, I try to take it on as a place of negotiation, as a place to listen, which is why no two projects look similar,” she continues. “I am always discovering the themes that lay under the surface. I am interested in all the layers - the dust, the earth, the land, and amplifying the intangible to make the invisible visible.” This technique is a hybrid form of architecture that brings together history, design, purpose and culture but most importantly is one that exists primarily to serve its occupants.

For the Pavilion, Vally began exploring London, and its waves of migration, through its archives and present-day spaces with similar resonance. She documented old movie posters, discovered the Four Aces Club in Dalston, which was one of the first venues to play Black music in the UK, and found the first mosque in London, as well as more casual forms of architecture, such as a set of steps in Brixton that were a meeting place for protests.

The Pavilion is a manifestation of these spaces built to provide both intimate and group sharing moments. “I have mostly enjoyed visiting the Pavilion every day and quietly watching how people use it,” she says. It is made entirely of sustainable materials including plywood, reclaimed cork and steel and is covered in microcement. The colour palette reflects her photography and the soft quality of light in London. “The shifting colours mark the change of light across the day,” she remarks.

The Pavilion will host a series of audio performances throughout the summer titled Listening to the City with commissioned work by artists including Ain Bailey and Jay Bernard. In extending the longevity of the Pavilion, Vally along with the Serpentine, has also created Support Structures for Support Structures, a fellowship programme that is awarding grants and mentorship to 10 artists and collectives occupied with ecological and community concerns in London. “Being an artist who works on breaking the boundaries of a field and on the fringes of something new, I know how important it is to have support and connection whilst doing this,” Vally says, thus ensuring the legacy and tangible benefit of the Pavilion will be felt on long after its own elegant walls come down.

The 20th Serpentine Pavilion in Kensington Gardens, London, is free to visit with no booking required until 17 October 2021

Words Xanthe Somers

Visit Counterspace
Visit Serpentine Galleries

Published on 16/06/2021