Site and water
Wind exposure, sightlines, who walks past and at what hour, and the water itself — hardness decides whether you will be descaling nozzles every spring.
Water architecture
Water does one thing well at a time.
We design and build fountains, water walls, reflecting pools and rills — and we decide first what the water is for. A basin that is meant to be still is not the same commission as one meant to be heard from the far side of a square.
Start a commission See what we have built
- Founded
- 1996
- Effects in the register
- 8
- Commissions
- 210+
01 — The practice
A pump, a plume and a maintenance contract.
Every water feature is three commissions in one: something to look at, a plant room that has to run it, and somebody who has to keep it running in February. We quote all three. The ones that fail are almost never the ones that looked wrong on day one — they are the ones nobody could afford to clean.
02 — Still water
A reflecting pool is a lighting instrument.
Disturb the surface and the floor lights up. Those bright lines are caustics — sunlight refracted by the curve of each wave and landing on top of itself. It is the reason a shallow pool makes a courtyard feel alive at noon, and the reason we specify the floor finish before we specify the water.
Move across the water
03 — Selected
Rill
Water wall
Reflecting pool
Rill
Swimming architecture
Interactive plaza
Built work
Rill
Millrace Court
Merrow Group · Rotterdam, Netherlands · 2023
Water wall
The Standing Sheet
Ashfield Museum of Industry · Sheffield, United Kingdom · 2021
Reflecting pool
Salt Court
Kestrel House · Lisbon, Portugal · 2024
Rill
Halden Forecourt
Halden Public Library · Copenhagen, Denmark · 2020
Swimming architecture
The Ledger Pool
Private client · Cape Town, South Africa · 2022
Interactive plaza
Nine Fields
Northbank Square Trust · Melbourne, Australia · 2023
04 — Hydraulics
How high it goes is not a style choice.
A jet leaves the nozzle at a velocity set by the pressure behind it, then loses to air. How much it loses depends entirely on whether the nozzle keeps the water in one piece. The four arcs below are integrated from those numbers, not drawn — the aerated jet is fed harder than the laminar one and still finishes lower.
0.8 bar
Laminar — glass rod Settling chamber and honeycomb straightener. No visible turbulence, so it carries light down its length.
1.6 bar
Smooth-bore vertical The default plaza jet. Clean column at the base, feathering to white at the crown.
2.2 bar
Aerated foam jet Entrains air at the nozzle. Loses height to drag but is bright white and legible in daylight.
2.0 bar
Arching lance, 38° Thrown across a basin rather than up. Reach matters more than height; wind moves it most.
05 — After dark
A fountain is a night building.
In daylight a jet is read against the sky and mostly disappears. Lit from beneath at night it becomes the brightest object in the square, which is when photographs get taken and when the choreography has to be worth watching. We programme sequences to the minute the site actually fills, not to a demo reel.
06 — The register
What water can be made to do
Ordered by how much plant each one needs behind it. The first three can be run off a single pump; the last needs its own room.
WE-01
Vertical jet The plain vertical column. Clean for the first two-thirds of its rise, then it breaks into droplets and turns white.
WE-02
Aerated jet The white foam column. Half air by volume, which is why it is visible in daylight from 200 m and…
WE-03
Weir sheet An unbroken curtain leaving a machined edge. The whole effect lives or dies on the flatness of one line of…
WE-04
Laminar jet A glass-clear rod of water with no visible turbulence. Reads as solid glass and carries light down its length.
WE-05
Mist A 5 to 10 micron cloud that evaporates before it lands. Not a small fountain — a different discipline with…
WE-06
Water bell A continuous film that leaves the nozzle as a dome and lands as a perfect circle. The most delicate thing…
WE-07
Pop jet A discrete slug of water launched by a fast valve. The only effect in the catalogue that can be choreographed…
WE-08
Film wall Water held in contact with a face all the way down, rather than falling clear of it. Quiet, wind-proof, and…
07 — Process
01
02
03
04
05
06
How a commission runs
Effect and plant
The effect is chosen against the site, not the catalogue. Then the plant room is sized to it, and the running cost is put in writing before anything is ordered.
Mock-up
A single bay is built and run on site. Clients change their minds about noise at this stage, which is exactly when changing it is still cheap.
Build and commission
Installed, balanced nozzle by nozzle, and handed over with the sequence programmed and the pressures logged.
The first winter
We return before the first freeze and again after it. Most faults a water feature will ever have appear in its first cold season.
Care
An annual visit, a spares holding, and a named engineer. A fountain nobody maintains is switched off within three years.
Tell us what the water is for.
Not how big. What it is for — to be heard, to be walked through, to be still, to be photographed at night. We will come back with an effect, a plant room and a running cost.
