57ROBIN
CARHART-HARRIS
40 • A new view of psychedelics
Can psychedelic drugs treat depression? That’s the promise of findings
from Robin Carhart-Harris, whose research is advancing a once fringe
idea—that psychedelics, such as LSD or psilocybin, the active ingredient
in magic mushrooms, might be able to treat some mental-health disorders,
such as depression and anxiety—which is now making waves in mainstream
medicine. Carhart-Harris leads Imperial College London’s Centre for
Psychedelic Research, which became the world’s first center focused
exclusively on studying how psychedelics can be used in mental-health
care when it opened in 2019. His work has found that psilocybin, combined
with psychotherapy, can be a fast-acting, powerful treatment for severe
depression. “Psychedelics seem to reveal things within one’s psyche that are
important and linked to why we are suffering, and they bring those things
to the fore,” he says, adding that we’ve only scratched the surface of their
therapeutic potential. —Mandy Oaklander
SumayyaVally31 • Broadening
the canonStudying architecture in her
native South Africa, Sumayya
Vally and her fellow students
were regularly told that anything
they could imagine had already
been done. The subtext was
clear: architecture belonged to
the West; all they could hope to
do was build upon it. Vally didn’t
buy it. To her, the rarefied world of
architecture had long ignored the
African experience. “There is so
much that has been taken away
from us or erased or ravaged on
the continent,” she says. “In look-
ing at these other ways of being,
there is so much design waiting to
happen.”
Five years ago, she launched
her own studio, Counter space,
in Johannesburg, to develop a
design language that acknowl-
edges and celebrates the African
continent. Her work, centered on
gathering spaces large and small,
struck a chord. In 2019, she
became the youngest architect
ever to receive one of her indus-
try’s biggest accolades: a com-
mission for London’s 2020/20+1
Serpentine Pavilion. The recogni-
tion, she says, “means that things
are shifting and changing, not
just for me and my voice, but for
the generation behind me.” Now a
teacher herself, she tells her own
students that there is another
architecture canon—it’s just up
to them to dream it. —A.B.AGBOOLA: COURTESY FLUTTERWAVE; EL-WAYLLY: DESEAN MCCLINTON-HOLLAND; UFOT: ILLUSTRATION BY
ALEXIS FRANKLIN FOR TIME; CARHART-HARRIS: SEBASTIAN NEVOLS; VALLY: MPHO MOKGADI