Sumayya Vally named as one of FT Readers’ Women of the Year

Therme Art Advisory Board member Summaya Vally, has been named as one of FT Readers’ Women of the Year 2023. The South African architect stands among 25 heroes, leaders and creators from around the world and across industries who have shaped the past 12 months and will continue to shape the future.

Sumayya is a visionary who co-founded the award-winning architecture and research firm Counterspace. Her design, research and pedagogical practice is committed to finding expression for hybrid identities and contested territories. She was also the designer of the 20th Serpentine Pavilion (2021) in London, and the youngest architect to be commissioned for the internationally renowned architecture programme. The Serpentine Pavilion program represents a paradigm of creative design, a template for a new kind of city founded on creativity, inclusion, and sustainability. Vally said: ‘My practice and this pavilion [are] centred around amplifying and collaborating with multiple and diverse voices from many different histories; with an interest in themes of identity, community, belonging and gathering. With the Serpentine, she initiated a new fellowship programme called “Support Structures for Support Structures”, which assists artists and collectives working at the intersection of art with social justice.

Serpentine Pavilion 2021 Exterior, by Counterspace

As Artistic Director, Vally curated and creatively shaped the first ever inaugural Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah this year. Born out of the need to broaden cultural understanding while highlighting new perspectives and discourse around what Islamic art is, the programme represents the diversity of experiences found within the Muslim world.

Sumayya has made invaluable contributions to Therme Art’s Wellbeing Culture Forum with numerous appearances. It was during the Wellbeing Culture Forum’s COMMUNION instalment in 2021 when she remarked “Architecture is a crystallisation of social forces. So seeing a misalignment between the two is not really a misalignment, but actually that architecture, for the most part, in most cities and places in the world, has been used as a force for separating people. But I think in being able to understand that, especially as a South African, who comes from a city in which there’s a history of the segregation and of a kind of weaponisation of architecture, we also have to see and understand that architecture absolutely can be used as a force for the opposite, as a force for gathering and for bringing people together.”

Vally shares this latest accolade with some of the world’s most pioneering women such as musician Taylor Swift, physicist Anne L’Huillier, journalist Mary Ann Sieghart and economist and Nobel Prize winner Claudia Goldin.