Architectural practice Counterspace was founded by South African native, Sumayya Vally, who was tapped as the youngest architect selected to design London’s Serpentine Pavilion.

Media executive and businessman Elie Khouri began building his art collection with the aim of representing artists across ages, genders and races. Now, he is moving forward with establishing a permanent home for the Elie Khouri Art Foundation, which is built on a small collection of its own.

Known as EKAF, the foundation will be housed in a repurposed villa in Dubai’s seafront Jumeirah 1 neighborhood, with a program spanning contemporary art exhibitions, education and public engagement.

“My foundation will be a home for contemporary art, open to everyone. A place to inspire, challenge and spark dialogue. Above all, I want to give something lasting back to Dubai and the wider UAE, a country that has given me so much, by helping build a cultural legacy for generations to come,” Khouri said in a statement.

The project is expected to be completed in late 2028 and has been entrusted to Counterspace, a Johannesburg-based architecture practice founded and led by Sumayya Vally. A Time100 Next honoree, Vally rose to prominence as the youngest architect commissioned to design London’s Serpentine Pavilion in 2021.

Vally’s vision builds on the region’s distinct contemporary architectural language, which continues to rapidly evolve alongside its population and cultural fabric.

“I am interested in what happens when we take these intimate geometries and give them a new public scale: when the architecture of a room becomes the architecture of a city-facing facade, and the memory of a house becomes the beginnings of an institution,” she said.

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