Water installation in front of the Connaught hotel

In the London district of Mayfair, at Carlos Place, west of the busy Regent Street, is located the luxurious 5-star hotel Connaught. In 2009, its owners decided to architecturally modify the space of the three-way intersection in front of the building and create a small entrance square with a sculpted street parterre.

They directly commissioned the creatively stable and still current Japanese architect Tadao Ando. Ando, as evident from the result, freed himself from his cliché use of exposed concrete with a grid of filled holes from scaffolding and approached the commission with invention. He created a small elliptical water reservoir. The main intention was to incorporate the existing pair of deciduous trees and merge them into the overall composition of the structure. Symbolically, it represents a dual connection of opposites (traditional-modern, west-east, silence-dynamics, nature-technology), aspects that are tied to the place. The mass of the elliptical structure, measuring 20 m in length and 10 m in the opposite direction, is traversed by a calm body of water along the outer outline of polished stone, forming a horizontally set ring. It has two core points at the locations of the trees, which are set apart from the water surface by a metal membrane. Every 15 minutes, vapor is released for 15 seconds from their inner gaps. The depth of the pool is only 3 cm. Its bottom is filled with a field of glass blocks (rather evoking the underside of 7 dl jars for preserves, embedded in a concrete grid), which are illuminated from below at night. This element, along with the effect of steam release, perfectly mystifies and dematerializes the space. The entrance parterre in front of the structure was completely filled with a grid of street paving with a marked access lane for cars.

By inserting a contemporary architectural element into a historic environment, at least according to the project author's claim, a polarity between the past and the future was created in the context of the present.