The Room: Mini Urban Garden in Mexico by Matteo Ghidoni + Enrico Dusi

It’s difficult to configure a room from a triangle. We’ve seen architects over the years attempt round buildings, glorious from the outside, a pragmatist’s purgatory from the inside. We’ve seen all sorts of shaped buildings, even collapsing paper bag buildings, glittery, shimmery buildings… But one suspects the last time we saw much triangular action was during the Egyptian period with the pyramids. And even then, they’re four sided and not three as a proper triangle is. But this didn’t stop architects Matteo Ghidoni + Enrico Dusi designing this temporary, yet intriguing, triangular installation as part of Metropoli, Festival Internacional De Arquitectura Y Ciudad.

Affectionately referred to as The ROOM, this project is a 43 square metre triangular space surrounded by 4 metre high walls. The walls are built from concrete blocks. The external surface is left unfinished whilst the interior walls are painted a cheerful, light pink hue.

As one might expect from a triangle shaped room, the entry is no less an oddity than the room itself. There’s something very fun and explorative about the way you enter this room, through an oversized 2metre wide round hole. Its smaller cousin sits proudly on an adjacent wall, a small porthole 3 metres off the ground, offering delightful vignettes of the cityscape around it.

The ROOM itself is filled with sand, like a giant sandpit. The crowning glory is a series of sculptural cacti sitting atop the sand mountain, reminding us that we’re not actually in a sandpit at all, but rather, within a modern art installation full of irony and paradoxes which really aren’t very childlike at all.

The projects has been designed to accommodate everyone, from the inside out. The outside walls hold basketball hoops but if you wanted to, you could deploy a spray can and scrawl your name along the bricks or project a film against the wall. “Outside, the walls provide 120 square meters of total exhibition surface for the festival purposes. But they can also be painted, used to hold temporary structures, covered with advertisement, vandalised,” said the architects.

The interior, full of sloping sand, is meant to be a refuge, to offer respite from the hectic city surrounds – its simplistic, desert theme was designed to remind the user of what the Mexican landscape used to be. “Inside, a silent ‘fragment of desert’ holds the memory of the origin of the city. It doesn’t suggest any specific activity, nor tries to force them. Its gentle slope is generous enough to accept the unpredictable. It produces a small region where the urban pressure of Mexico City is both absorbed and provisionally suspended,” said the architects.

The ROOM only ever designed to last two weeks – less than the lifespan of a butterfly. One would hardly consider blocks of brick to be ephemeral but maybe they are. Maybe anything built from a nonsensical triangle was only going to be loved for a finite period of time.