London ? The Princess Diana memorial fountain will not exactly be a fountain after all, but a “necklace” of water designed by an American whose concept immediately attracted controversy.

“She’s the most celebrated Briton of the last quarter century, and we’ve remembered her with a puddle,” lamented Vivienne Parry, a longtime friend of the late princess, who clearly wasn’t pleased by the announcement Wednesday that Kathryn Gustafson had won.

Kathryn Gustafson's winning design in the competition to create a fountain in memory of Princess Diana is shown in this computer-generated image. Described as a necklace of water, Gustafson's design was chosen Wednesday. The memorial will be built in London's Hyde Park, and it is expected to be completed by August 2003, in time for the sixth anniversary of Diana's death.

But Diana’s close friend Rosa Monckton said she was sure the Gustafson design was “the right choice to create an appropriate memorial to Diana.”

Monckton headed the committee that grappled with the choice for 18 months and finally deadlocked, leaving government Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell to make the final decision.

Jowell, calling it a “judgment of Solomon,” picked the design of Seattle-based Gustafson, whose proposal was for an oval ring of stones filled with water that would sit like “a necklace across the existing contours of the site” in London’s Hyde Park.

The other finalist for the $4.7 million project, winnowed from about 60 entries, was a daring plan for a colored dome of water by Bombay-born British artist Anish Kapoor.

Jowell’s choice is not what most people would think of as a fountain. It is described as a “water feature,” to be built beside the Serpentine, the lake in Hyde Park close to Diana’s former home at Kensington Palace.