🇬🇧United Kingdom·Open to visitors

Silence, Carlos Place water feature

Mayfair, London

Sources checked October 2026

“Two trees rise from a granite-edged pool and are wrapped in mist every fifteen minutes.”

Year: 2011
Architect: Tadao Ando
Type: Pool and mist fountain on a public street
Access: On the public highway, freely accessible

At the corner of Mount Street and Carlos Place, in front of the Connaught hotel, Tadao Ando designed a raised granite-edged pool in which two trees grow. Atomisers hidden at their base wrap the trunks in vapour for fifteen seconds every fifteen minutes. The work, unveiled in 2011, was commissioned jointly by the hotel and the landowner Grosvenor.

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In depth ≈ 1 min read

History

Silence came from a joint commission by the Connaught hotel and Grosvenor, which manages the Mayfair and Belgravia estate. It belongs to the first phase of a £10 million programme to improve the estate's streets, carried out with Westminster City Council. The hotel's owners decided in 2009 to reshape the junction and approached Ando directly. The project was delivered with the British practice Blair Associates Architects, and BDP completed the detailed design. It was unveiled in July 2011.

Architecture

The work is a raised elliptical pool, about 20 m by 10 m, edged in polished stone. It holds two trees that already stood on the junction, which the design folds into the composition. Atomisers at their base release a cloud of vapour for fifteen seconds every quarter of an hour; at the bottom of the pool, glass lenses with fibre optics light the water at night. Symbolically, the work joins opposites: tradition and modernity, west and east, silence and movement, nature and technology. The junction in front of the work was repaved.