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This is not a giant hedgehog. It’s a building. Designed as an experiment in surface texture for a sculpture garden not far from London, it’s called a sitooterie, and it has a central area just 2.4 metres square, a door, a seat and a window.

“It’s not terribly big inside,” admitsRon Packman, a structural engineer with London-based Heatherwick Studio, the design company that built it. But the sitooterie’s surface area is vast, with more than 4000 hollow aluminium tubes, each sealed with a plastic cap. “The spines all point to the centre of the box,” explains Packman. “We wanted them to work like optical fibres. At night, just one 100-watt light bulb at the centre can light up…