So far, most of the designs for the annual summer pavilion on the lawn in front of London's Serpentine Gallery in London's Kensington Gardens have made reference to the surrounding parkland.

But this year's building, which, due to the pandemic, is one year late as the twentieth contribution to the series that began at the turn of the millennium with Zaha Hadid, has an emphatically inner-city concept in its conception.

This is thanks to the origins of Summaya Vally, co-founder of the South African architecture collective Counterspace, who at 31 is the youngest contractor in the series.

Gina Thomas

Features correspondent based in London.

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    The granddaughter of an Indian-Muslim immigrant, who grew up in a township in Pretoria during the last legs of the apartheid regime, was sensitive to the use of architecture and urban planning as a means of control. Since then, this experience has shaped the interdisciplinary approach of her practice of expressing the neglected historical and sociocultural background of the marginalized in the urban fabric - with methods that go beyond the conventional, western-centered building culture.

    Vally understands architecture as “condensing and superimposing epochs, stories, field notes, excerpts, archeologies and forensic samples”. Before the pandemic, she wandered the streets of London for months, scouring archives for tangible and incomprehensible traces and voices. While rummaging through diasporic squares, she has gathered a wealth of elements that are incorporated into her pavilion and that represent the endeavor to establish deeper connections to the place and community. Hairdressing salons, corner shops, places of worship such as the first purpose-built mosque, which was inaugurated in South London in 1926, but also the textures of walls and facades or sidewalks are reflected in the melting pot of quotations, as are some meeting places that are no longer available today.These include the Mangrove Restaurant in London's Notting Hill, which closed just before the turn of the millennium, which was a hub for Caribbean immigrants, and a radical intercultural bookstore to the east of the city.

    Like ghosts of the past

    The elements are assembled like a capriccio under a round roof resting on columns.

    Here an Islamizing capital, there a fragment of a door frame, a paneling or a staircase.

    The ensemble is made of plywood clad with black panels or covered with tinted microcement.

    Behind it is a load-bearing steel frame, which in turn is embedded in a concrete foundation, which caused quite a stir in connection with the self-declared commitment to sustainability.

    The quotes seem like ghosts of the past. They are not directly recognizable, nor should they be, especially since they sometimes embody snapshots, as is the case with a low area that was inspired by an iftar evening in front of a mosque that was affected by the great high-rise fire in North Kensington four years ago has supported. With the different textures and colors of the microcement, Vally emphasizes the diversity of voices that she wants to make sound architecturally. This also determines the room layout of the approximately 350 square meter area of ​​the pavilion, which houses a café and serves as the venue for the “Listening to the City” program, which takes up the ideas behind the pavilion.

    In order to promote dialogue, Vally has created assembly corners for groups of different sizes from the puzzle-like components, as a microcosm of the multicultural city.

    Dialogue, belonging and identity in the past and present are also very important in the conception of the architect, who the American magazine Time selected as one of the hundred most promising executives in February.

    Four fragments carry the message into the city

    As a temporary facility, the Serpentine Pavilion itself can be interpreted as a symbol of the processes of transience and displacement that Summaya Vally wants to symbolize with its search for clues. This time, however, the area of ​​impact is to be expanded and the duration of the impact is to be extended through two initiatives initiated by Counterspace. On the one hand, four fragments of the pavilion installed in as many joint cultural enterprises with a migrant focus carry the message into the city. In addition, up to ten artists or collectives who work at the interface between art, community engagement and spatial politics are to be supported through a program endowed with 100,000 pounds.

    In terms of ideas, Summaya Vally's pavilion hits the nerve of the times, especially with regard to the colonialism debate.

    Unfortunately, in its mixture of temple, agora and Egyptian Art Deco style, the structure appears chunky, cool and strangely uncharismatic, like a machine product, despite the many atmospheric echoes.

    Nevertheless, he calls to mind lines from TS Eliot's “Four Quartets”, in which the poet reflects on time and timelessness: “Footsteps ring out, here in memory / Here along this path that we never walked / To this door that us remained locked / The door to the rose garden. "

    Until October 17th.

    A catalog will appear in the course of the summer.