Sumayya Vally in her Serpentine Pavilion
(Picture: AFP via Getty Images)“It’s been a wild ride,” admits Sumayya Vally, the youngest architect of a Serpentine Pavilion yet. Her practice Counterspace revealed its winning 2020 design only for Covid-19 to pounce weeks later.
Forced to return to Johannesburg where her father almost succumbed to the virus and her fellow directors left the South African architecture practice, she has been plotting and planning long-distance ahead of this week’s pavilion opening. The result is splendid, a black drum carved out and lined in a soft screed of micro-cement in palest pink, light grey and mouseback brown micro-cement and cork.
The sculpted innards are a continuous surface of seats and shelves, columns and slots. They reference London locations where communities have come together in the past and present – the steps of a Railton Road terrace, the office of an Afro-Caribbean newspaper, Brutalist ribbed concrete, and the delicate fluting of a classical column. One area feels like a corridor, another like a catwalk. But, says Vally, they are all more abstract architectural gestures rather than a collage of actual quotations or Rachel Whiteread-style direct casts. “The whole pavilion is a symbolic folding-in of London,” she explains. Internal shapes allude to the plans of other buildings – a circle here, a square there, grouped by the colour palette.
The continuous surface and massing give this year’s pavilion extra presence compared with some years where the use of low-slung tent structures or nerdish extrapolation of hi-tech construction junctions can sometimes diffuse pavilion power. That said, the shift away from weighty materials (a type of eco-brick was once envisaged) to rendered ply lends something of a stage set quality. Speakers mounted in the ceiling will play a commissioned soundscape.
Vally fretted about obsessing over aesthetics when some of the London organisations she was working with were busy running food banks: “As an architect who does work with community clients, I know never to assume that someone wants what we have to give.”
But give she has in the form of four pavilion fragments housed in places across London – a black bookshop, a library, a garden and the Albany Theatre, Deptford. At the Tabernacle in Notting Hill this is a tiny outdoor platform and steps for a performance. At the outset the idea was that each object would be a place to gather in over the summer, slightly reconfiguring the pavilion each time. They will now stay put permanently as part of feelers the Serpentine is putting out to communities including programmes Vally has set up including a podcast in Barking and a fellowship for young artists.
Wouldn’t it be lovely to see this metaphorical and actual gathering space crowded with a party though? She’s sanguine: “Soon, hopefully.”
