Possibly the smallest interior project on record, and certainly the most controversial, this began as a university design assignment. Dismayed by the state of Valletta's public toilets, the studio sent architecture students out to reimagine what using one could feel like: proposals ranged from cubicles suspended off an iron bridge to semi-underground vaults topped with a green roof.

The results were striking enough to bring to Valletta's mayor directly, with an offer to redesign one of the city's five public conveniences. He agreed, on one condition: the studio would have to fund it. A bathroom supplier and existing client came on board to sponsor the project and running it, and the oldest of the five toilets - on Strait Street - became the first to be reimagined.

The real question was how to shift the stigma attached to public toilets altogether, turning a purely functional space into something worth visiting. The studio's answer was to treat it as a public art space rather than a bathroom: contemporary art and nature sitting inside the same small footprint. Strait Street's own history as Valletta's red-light district in the early 1900s set the tone: a lavish demi-stage in red and grey, Carrara marble underfoot, mirrors dressed to look like curtains. Visual artist Norbert Attard took the cue and built a provocative installation for the space, inside and out, drawing on Thomas Pynchon's novel V.

The message was simple: contemporary art doesn't belong only in museums and galleries. It belongs everywhere, even in the most unassuming corner of a city.