50.8K
Followers
6,108
Following
896
Posts
N/A
Reels
N/A
Highlights
12/0
Photos/Videos in last 12
Bio
architect @_counterspace Johannesburg 🇿🇦
-
Avg likes
-
Avg comments
-
Engagement
2.0/wk
Posting
Likes and comments are still being collected for this account. Check back shortly.
Recent posts
Counterspace, led by @sumi_v , has been appointed to design the permanent home of the Elie Khouri Art Foundation @eliekhouriartfoundation in Dubai.
The project, expected to open in late 2028, will transform an existing domestic villa in Jumeirah 1 into a vibrant public space for contemporary art, learning, and cultural exchange. Conceived between the streetscapes of Beirut and the courtyard cosmologies of the Gulf, the design repurposes the intimate domestic memories of the site into a city-facing public vernacular complete with galleries, pavilions, educational spaces, and gardens.
"I think of buildings as having many lives. At EKAF, we begin with a house that has already held a world within it... I am interested in what happens when we take these intimate geometries and give them a new public scale." - Sumayya Vally
11 Nov 2026
Pilgrimage to Djerba to see some of its 365 Ibadite mosques, little earthy-white white geometries, sometimes barely distinguishable from the limestone, salt, olive groves and earth around them. Some fortified, some subterranean, others so intimate that the entire architecture seems calibrated to the dimensions of a single praying body. Their whitewashed surfaces receive the changing light of the day; their thick walls hold shadow and coolness.
Each mosque also belonged to a decentralised political and social ecology, in which families and local communities assumed responsibility for their own places of worship and the land around them, making stewardship of a small piece of shared territory an expression of collective autonomy; a system which enhanced the co-existence of faiths on an island in which religions co-existed for generations.
During the inaugural Islamic @biennale_sa in Jeddah, @rubicon_m introduced me to the work of @leftarchitects , who we then commissioned for a piece on Djerba together with Iheb Guermezi and Beya Othmani, to develop Jerba: Prototype 366. Beginning with this remarkable architectural inheritance, they proposed a 366th mosque, composed of the most essential elements that were consistent across the typologies they researched. I was interested then, as I am now, in the possibility of understanding sacred architecture as a living typology, one that carries histories, rituals and spatial knowledge across geographies and generations.
Being in Djerba made that proposition feel especially immediate.
An architecture small enough to hold one person, and vast enough to hold a world.
11 Nov 2026
From a distance, the settlement appears less like a continuous mass, shaped as much by inhabitation as by accretion and erosion.
Built from kershef - a mixture of salt-rich earth and clay drawn from the oasis - Siwa’s architecture is an architectural intelligence in which material, climate and social organisation are inseparable.
Houses are not conceived as isolated units, but as parts of a larger spatial and structural fabric. They accumulate vertically and horizontally, negotiating access and producing a complex sequence of passages, thresholds and enclosures so the individual dwelling is always implicated in the collective form. This compactness is often understood primarily as a climatic response. Thick walls provide thermal mass, narrow passages produce shade, and the density of the settlement reduces exposure to the desert sun.
To read it only through environmental performance is to miss its deeper architectural significance. The same spatial structures that regulate heat and light also organize social life; the gradations between public passage, shared threshold and domestic interior establish relationships of proximity and separation, visibility and privacy, individual autonomy and communal dependence. Social organisation is not simply accommodated by architecture; it is embedded in its physical configuration.
Everything viscerally feels made by the hand, measured by the body, and animated by the heavens. As light passes through the salt windows, it reveals different colours over the course of the day - at moments milky and opalescent, then amber, rose, honey-coloured as the sun moves. There is something of the stained-glass window of a church here, with the earth itself becoming the glass; a kind of mineral liturgy, where the passage of the sun is made visible through matter.
08 Nov 2026
Structures are built from memory, gesture, and the radical act of gathering.
An architectural model of our AlUla project is currently on view at Beyti Beytak: Architectures of MENASA curated by Sean Anderson and Aurélien Lemonier @artmill_museum
Translating to "my home is your home," Beyti Beytak brings together practice and reflection from across the region to ask what it means to hold space, to honour landscape, and to craft belonging.
Alongside the exhibition, our @tacapaeharvest project is also featured in the accompanying publication, Architectures of MENASA, which documents shifting spatial conditions across the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia; to which @sumi_v also contributed a chapter essay on gathering.
Exhibition: Beyti Beytak
Project: AlUla artists dwelling/studio and @tacapaeharvest artist residencies by @sumi_v and Counterspace
Curated by Aurélien Lemonier, @artmill_museum Senior Curator of Architecture, Design and Gardens; Sean Anderson, Guest Co-Curator and Scholar; assisted by Virgile Alexandre, Independent Curator, and Farah Al Sidiky, Art Mill Museum Senior Curatorial Researcher. Beyti Beytak is designed by Cookies and its visual identity by Gaggero Works.
Location: Fahad Bin Ali Palace, Doha, Qatar
Publication: Architectures of MENASA, edited by Sean Anderson and Virgile Alexandre, published by Silvana Editoriale in collaboration with @qatar_museums
With deepest thanks to the @almayassabnthamad @qatar_museums @artmill_museum and the curators and team ✨
05 Nov 2026
In this year, the fragility of the idea of home has escalated for so many, with the absence of being able to return physically to friendships, habits and familiarities of cultures in cities that have become points of anchoring and home.
Doha is increasingly one of those places. I have always believed that the significance of cultural institutions is not only in their architecture or collections, it is in the life they make possible around and between them, their capacities to create a shared civic and intellectual ground, and to make space for different histories, perspectives and futures.
My deepest congratulations to Her Excellency Sheikha @almayassabnthamad , whose extraordinary commitment to culture continues to shape Doha as a place of artistic exchange and dialogue. It is especially meaningful to see the understanding that building cultural institutions is also about building a city’s capacity to connect people and sustain relationships; and to imagine its future.
I am looking forward to this November to return to familiar streets and beloved faces, to pick up conversations and dreams where we left them, to be reunited with friends across so many geographies, and to greet the possibilities of otherwise worlds. Home is something we continually construct through these encounters, through the places we make for one another just by these encounters, and the worlds they allow us to dream.
Last week has been a visceral reminder of why we need these spaces, how much we need one another; how much of the work of bringing other futures into being begins, quite simply, with finding ourselves together 🌹
03 Nov 2026
Happy birthday Zaha
89 DEGREES OF ZAHA HADID
Fri 30—Sat 31 October 2026
, أفق، أثر، معاً: horizon, trace, together - a dialogue between Arabic and Urdu, 2026; posters produced by @sumi_v for @hansulrichobrist exhibition on Zaha at Luma Foundation, Arles, currently on show
Across Arabic and Urdu, the words أفق، أثر، معاً are shared linguistic and spatial concepts, carried through a common script and centuries of exchange across the Arab world, Persia, and South Asia.
Ufuq names the horizon: the edge of vision, but also a field of possibility, “the wide world” or distant realm that extends beyond immediate perception.
Athar/asar holds the trace: an imprint, a residue, an effect that lingers, suggesting both memory and consequence.
Ma’an brings these into relation: togetherness as solidarity, proximity, co-presence, and collective becoming.
Read together, the three words form a conceptual sequence: from horizon to trace to togetherness, mapping how space is imagined, marked, and shared.
Through these shared terms, architecture becomes a site of translation where horizons are extended, traces are re-read, and new forms of togetherness are made possible across geographies that have long been in conversation.
This weekend, Sumayya Vally (@sumi_v) joins the 89 Degrees of Zaha Hadid Symposium, for two sessions:
- Would They Call Me a Diva If I Were a Guy?: Being Zaha
- The World is Not a Rectangle
A collaboration between @zahahadidfoundation @aaschool and @serpentineuk it has been curated by @aricchen @jihanedyer @francescofiammenghi (Zaha Hadid Foundation), @shumonbasar and @hansulrichobrist (Serpentine), and features over 40 incredible scholars, collaborators and friends.
Thank you @shumonbasar @aricchen @zahahadidfoundation @serpentineuk @bettinakorek @hansulrichobrist @aricchen @iis1000 and the incredible teams for having us! 🖤
31 Oct 2026
In these; I wonder after the formal and intellectual genealogies that are precursors to Zaha. There are remarkable resonances in the treatment of geometry as something dynamic and unstable, the dissolution of fixed compositions, and the proposition that form might express movement, transformation and entirely new spatial possibilities; a shared cultural and intellectual terrain from which radical formal experimentation could emerge.
What Lingers in the Artist Mind: Experiments and Legacies of the Baghdad Modern Art Group, curated by @shabout_nada @zeinaarida which just opened at @mathafmodern in Doha is an extraordinary survey of the intellectual and formal ambitions of Iraqi modernism, tracing the experiments of the Baghdad Modern Art Group, founded in 1951 by Jewad Selim and Shakir Hassan Al Said, and the artistic genealogies that emerged from it.
The group sought to articulate a distinctly Iraqi modernity, neither a reproduction of European modernism nor a nostalgic return to historical forms, but a new visual language emerging from the encounter between Mesopotamian antiquity, Islamic artistic traditions, vernacular culture and the political and social transformations of the twentieth century. Geometry, abstraction, fragmentation and movement became instruments through which questions of identity, cultural continuity and collective futures could be negotiated.
The exhibition is an important act of historiographic recovery, bringing together artworks, drawings and archival fragments while acknowledging the absences produced by decades of war, displacement and cultural erasure. It asks us to reconsider how histories of modernism are constructed.
These experiments were deeply implicated in the project of imagining modernity on Iraqi terms. Form was understood as a means of constructing new social, cultural and political imaginaries. Before these geometries birthed buildings, they were already propositions for other worlds. Meta to see these within the propositions for all the incredible worlds that have been seeded and are on the way through the incredible work of @almayassabnthamad @qatar_museums @mathafmodern 🖤〰️
28 Oct 2026
In the atmosphere of Sophia at home sweet Rome à la @marykatrantzou 🖤
27 Oct 2026
The Music Room, 1958, Satyajit Ray
13 Oct 2026
so many inspirations - beautiful beings and beautiful things on bodies on chairs on runways at tables
12 Oct 2026
Melancholic, beautifully funny, tender and defiant at once. In my mind they slip into our own ambling long summer nights, autumn afternoons, winter evenings; pavements to gardens to fireplaces and back out into the night. The small architectures of friendship, exuberance, longing, belonging; through which a city becomes ours slips into the paintings; and the atmospheres of the hour when the city softens into pools of amber, blue and green light; figures gathering on pavements, leaning into doorways and in gardens spills out from the paintings and into this room @courtauld .All of us gathered amongst these figures, old friends, new friends.
This is how new worlds are made after all; by finding one another, gathering; making a place through our being together. To look around the room and see so many of us here, together: this room full of your people with these Lahore nights and these brown, searching, beautiful bodies that inhabit the walls of the Courtauld. A room full of love and pride for you @salman.toor 💚
01 Oct 2026
Architecture made by subtraction, the homes of Matmata are excavated into the earth: deep courtyards cut vertically into the plateau, with rooms carved laterally into their walls. The ground is façade, roof, structure arranged around an interior sky. There is an extraordinary intelligence in this inversion. The landscape is hollowed out to hold life. The thermal mass of the earth tempers the extremes of the desert, while the sunken court gathers light and air into its centre. From above, almost nothing announces the domestic worlds beneath.
The architecture is an intimacy negotiated with earth, an older proposition for architecture before object; shelter can begin with how we enter the world not what we enter it with.
29 Sep 2026
Follower tracking
We have started recording @sumi_v, but only 1 observation so far — not enough to show a trend yet. Track it daily →
Download @sumi_v's data
Everything below is derived from this account, priced on the counts shown. Delivered as CSV by emailed link.
You only pay for rows we deliver. Counts are the maximum available today; if an export comes back smaller, the difference is refunded automatically. Counts as last collected 15 hours, 55 minutes ago.
Tracking
A monthly plan, not a download: we keep reading @sumi_v and email you what changed.
Other reports
Not downloads of this account: they take their own inputs.
Similar accounts
Accounts we track that share hashtags, mentions or bio topics with @sumi_v.
@_counterspace
33.2K followers
Also mentions @jihanedyer
@jetset_experimental
87.1K followers
Also mentions @zahahadidfoundation
@chris__bayley
2,989 followers
Also mentions @shumonbasar
@ahmadangawi
18.5K followers
Also mentions @biennale_sa
@erdem
1.1M followers
Also mentions @qatar_museums
@hansulrichobrist
417.3K followers
Also mentions @bettinakorek
@serpentineuk
507.8K followers
Also mentions @qatar_museums
@lanzaatelier
64.9K followers
Also mentions @qatar_museums