VISUAL CULTURE

Re-inventing the Wheel – Speed in Slow Motion: The London Eye (Millennium Wheel)

Visual Culture in Britain, Vol.4, No.2, 2003, pp.21-40.

by Paul Overy

[cont’d]

Both its designers, the architects Julia Barfield and David Marks, and its sponsors British Airways have been anxious to emphasize differences between the London Eye and earlier Wheels¹⁶. Nevertheless the iconic image it projects remains close to that of the original Wheels¹⁷ erected in Chicago (1893), London (1895), Blackpool (1896), Vienna (1897) and Paris (1900).

Structurally the two types of Great Wheel are symptomatic of the technologies current at the time they were erected. The Ferris Wheel resembles a gigantic bicycle wheel¹⁸. Bicycle technology lay behind the development of both the motorcar and the airplane. The Wright brothers were bicycle engineers, as were most early car manufacturers. While it retains the bicycle-like spokes the Millennium Wheel more closely resembles the turbine fan of a jet engine, an apt symbol for late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century means of transport. Both the Ferris Wheel and the Millennium Wheel share the quality of moving very slowly, yet both are ‘attractions’ that celebrate notions of modernity. This is in some ways paradoxical. Throughout the twentieth century speed was considered a seminal signifier of modernity, the wheel an iconic image of speed, progress, mobility and circulation¹⁹. A few months before the London Eye opened The Times commented:

A wheel is also an appropriate symbol for the millennium celebrations. The development of this simple device aptly matches that of mankind itself. It was first invented more than 5,000 years ago by the ancient Mesopotamians, but it took nearly 1,500 years before radial spokes were considered. Even a century ago the wheel had only just begun to be used on the motorcar. The largest wheel ever devised will now dominate London as the millennium ends²⁰.

Both Great Wheels, however, appear to contradict ‘given’ associations of speed and modernity by producing in spectators and passengers sensations of almost stately slowness that might seem more appropriate to an earlier age. By emphasizing the cyclical nature of (the) experience they assert a continuity with the past as much as an engagement with the discontinuous present.

How do we explain the potent symbolism and obvious popularity of the Millennium Wheel in the early twenty-first century? Does a ride on the London Eye constitute a retardataire or a postmodern experience? Both the Ferris Wheel and the Millennium Wheel move S-L-O-W-L-Y, but the modern Millennium Wheel turns even more slowly than the 100-year old Ferris Wheel. To someone looking at it from the ground or from a distance its movement is only just discernible. While the experience of riding the Wheel is essentially one of ‘vision in motion’ – as László Moholy-Nagy characterized the ‘modern’ manner of perception in the first decades of the twentieth century – this seems to be ‘vision in slow motion’ rather than ‘seeing at speed²¹’.

The slowly changing panoramic viewpoints offered by the London Eye and the Riesenrad provide a complex, layered overview of the city through time. As the cabin gradually rises, the passengers’ first impressions are of the nearest parts of the city, viewed from an only slightly elevated position. As it rises further the view extends, taking in more and more of the city seen from a greater height and at a greater distance, until eventually the zenith is reached. At this point the whole city can be seen spread out below like a three-dimensional relief map and the horizon is clearly visible. The passengers receive a multiple, changing and overlaid perception of the city from the initial fragmented close-up views as the cabin begins to rise, through the panoptic panoramas at the Wheel’s zenith and back down to the fragmented engagement with the modern city as the cabin sinks towards ground level.

When the first Ferris Wheel was opened in Chicago in 1893, newspaper reports emphasized the multiplicity of views and viewpoints it allowed. One commentator described it as ‘an indescribable sensation, that of revolving through such a vast orbit in a bird cage, that of swinging in a circle far out over the Plaisance in one direction, then turning in the other direction, and still higher, and finally beginning the descent from such a great height.’[22]. Another contrasted the different ways in which the spectator perceived the view of the city spread out in the distance and that of the Midway Plaisance immediately below the cabin, the amusement section of the Fair seen from directly above with its various attractions and ‘national villages’ swarming with visitors²³:

Looking to the north and west they saw the great majestic city lying beneath them shimmering in the rays of the setting sun and radiant in the foliage of early summer. The ever-present pall of smoke hung low over the spires and housetops to the north, but was slowly receding before the soft evening breeze. Directly beneath was the wonderful panorama of the Midway Plaisance, black with its seething, world-garnered population, flashing with the mingled glow of coloured lights and gay banners²⁴.

The sensations received by the spectator riding the original Great Wheels were not only optical but also aural, and presumably olfactory as well. Commentators in Chicago noted the sounds of the music played by the ‘inhabitants’ of the national villages in the Midway Plaisance area that included European examples such as an Austrian village, as well as orientalist, Arab and Turkish villages²⁵. From the Vienna Riesenrad it was possible to hear the sounds of music from the various popular restaurants in the Prater below, many of which represented the different ethnic groups that made up the Austro-Hungarian empire, and to catch the smell of steaming sauerkraut or grilling cevapčiči wafting up through the air²⁶. Such ‘villages’ were a particular feature of both Great Exhibitions and the pleasure grounds of late-nineteenth-century metropolises. They represented the country as opposed to the city and the ‘primitive’ past as opposed to the ‘modern’ present. They represented the ‘otherness’ of the more far-flung parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (from where came many of Vienna’s population) or the distant place of origin of the citizens of diasporic and immigrant cities like Chicago²⁷. Olfactory and aural sensations are not among those offered to passengers on the Millennium Wheel. The capsules are sealed and air-conditioned like the cabins of modern passenger airplanes. This gives the experience a distanced, almost ‘virtual’ quality. It is as if the advanced technology of the Millennium Wheel turns the ‘real’ panorama of London spread below it into a simulated panoramic experience. Perhaps to counteract this, passengers have their photographs taken as they leave the cabins, to show that that they were really there, on the Wheel²⁸.

Both the Riesenrad and the London Eye provide the experience of a kind of mechanized strolling or flânerie. (The sites of flânerie were closely linked to those of the panorama²⁹.) However, unlike the flâneur, the observers in the cabin of the Wheels do not ‘botanize on the asphalt’ in Benjamin’s memorable phrase³⁰. Rather they ‘lepidopterize in the air’, chasing the fragile and ever-changing butterfly-like spectacle of urban modernity. Jonathan Crary has argued that whereas the static nineteenth-century panorama at least obliged spectators to turn their heads, the diorama – the panorama’s mechanized revolving derivative – required them to sit immobile while the moving panorama unfolded before their eyes. Crary sees this as positioning the observer as a mere component of the viewing machine, ‘a machine of wheels in motion³¹’. But if the spectators riding both the London Eye and the Vienna Riesenrad are required to become part of an even more complex and spectacular ‘machine of wheels in motion’, they are not required to sit immobile through this experience. Not only do they turn their heads and eyes in order to see the panorama stretched out beneath them, they also move around the cabins to get different viewpoints of the city below, taking photographs and making videos. Special panoramic throwaway cameras are on sale by the Millennium Wheel so that passengers can capture a representation of the panoramic gaze. The Wheel gives the viewer an experience marked by animated and active perception (lepidopterizing in the air) rather than passive contemplation. Through its mechanism the city is made to represent itself, while the spectators are induced to feel they are actively participating in the production as well as in the reception of this representation.

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Notes [cont’d]

¹⁶ Relatively unknown before the Millennium Wheel project, both Barfield and Marks had worked for the Richard Rogers partnership. Barfield also worked for Norman Foster.

¹⁷ The London Wheel, erected at Earl’s Court, was dismantled in the winter of 1906/1907, the Paris Wheel in 1921, the Blackpool Wheel in 1928. A Vienna law court issued approval authorizing the demolition of the Riesenrad in 1916 but this was not carried out because of shortage of funds due to the First World War. Helmut Jahn and Peter Petritsch, The Vienna Giant Ferris Wheel (Riesenrad), no publisher listed, nd [c.1990], p.12.

¹⁸ ‘The Ferris Wheel is constructed on the same principle as a bicycle wheel, the only difference being that, while that of the bicycle rests on the ground, the Ferris Wheel is suspended from its axle.’ James W. Shepp and Daniel B. Shepp, Shepp’s World’s Fair Photographed, Chicago and Philadelphia: Globe Bible Publishing Co., 1893, p.502.

¹⁹ Ivan Illich has argued that the image of ‘circulation’ inspired by William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood was only taken up in the nineteenth century when sanitary reformers like Edwin Chadwick created a circulation of water (and sewage) to ‘purify’ the system of the modern city. See Ivan Illich, H20 and the Waters of Forgetfulness, London and New York: Marion Boyars, 1986, p.38. This image of circulation became transferred to that of urban transport and the movement of goods and people through the modern city, and in the final decade of the nineteenth century found its symbolic inscription in the Great Wheel.

²⁰ ‘Eye in the Sky: A wheel thrill for the Millennium’, The Times, 18 October 1999.

²¹ See László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1947. Similar ideas are discussed in many of Moholy’s earlier essays and books since the 1920s.

²² Graves, ‘World’s Fair’.

²³ Although there had been fringe attractions (and distractions) at earlier nineteenth century Great Exhibitions, the 1893 Chicago World Fair was the first where the two aspects of the exhibition were given a geographical separation (and almost equal importance). ‘The White City’ or ‘official’ section contained the ‘serious’ didactic exhibits, including the national and international pavilions, while the ‘Midway Plaisance’ (where the first Ferris Wheel was located along with other popular attractions) formed a dedicated fairground or pleasure garden area within the perimeters of the exhibition. By the time of the New York World Fair of 1939 the whole of the exhibition had become an ‘entertainment’ with each pavilion an ‘attraction’ so that the difference between ‘White City’ and ‘Midway’ had become blurred. However post-Second World War national and international exhibitions such as the 1951 Festival of Britain did not follow this pattern of integrating entertainment with didacticism. The Festival’s ‘Midway Plaisance’ was located several miles upstream at the Battersea Pleasure Gardens.

²⁴ ‘266 Feet in Air’.

²⁵ Ibid.

²⁶ Today these have largely been replaced by burger and kebab stands (images of globalization rather than of empire) although a few traditional Viennese open-air restaurants survive.

²⁷ The Prater not only had ethnic restaurants representing the different ethnic groups that made up the empire, there were also nostalgic/exotic displays such as ‘Venice in Vienna’ a recreation of Venice complete with canals and gondoliers displayed at the Prater from 1894. Venice had been part of the Austro-Hungarian until 1866 and was viewed with great nostalgia by middle-class Viennese who visited the city in large numbers as tourists at the turn of the century. ‘Venice in Vienna’ had been built by Gabor Steiner who also financed the Riesenrad and was situated in the same part of the Prater so that passengers on the Wheel would have looked down directly onto it. From about 1900 Japanese, Spanish and Egyptian buildings were added but the attraction continued to be known as ‘Venice in Vienna’ until the First World War when it was pulled down. From the summer of 1896 to the autumn of 1897 at precisely the time when the Wheel was under construction there was an ‘Ashanti Village’ in the Prater Zoo where Ashanti men and women were displayed in their supposed ‘natural’ habitat of a simulated ‘native village’ as an exploitative erotic and racist spectacle. This was to be the subject of a series of prose poems by the eccentric Viennese writer Peter Altenberg published in 1897 as Ashantee. See Andrew Barker, Telegrams from the Soul: Peter Altenberg and the Culture of fin-de-siècle Vienna, Columbia: Camden House, 1996, pp.63-74. The Prater Zoo no longer exists.

²⁸ These are processed and ready for visitors to take away with them in a few minutes.

²⁹ Vanessa Schwartz has observed of the panorama, that from the start ‘this realist entertainment mingled geographically with what would soon becomes the sites of flânerie’. Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1998, p.151. At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Passage des Panoramas – the first of the many passages or arcades put up in Paris during the early nineteenth century – was built to connect the two rotundas where the first commercial panoramas had opened to the public the year before. Together with the entrepreneur James Thayer who owned sites on the Boulevard Montmartre in Paris, the American Robert Fulton (the inventor of the steamboat) built two rotundas seventeen metres wide and seven metres high to house two panoramas, which opened in 1799, ‘A View of Paris and its environs, as seen from the top of the Tuileries palace’ and ‘The Evacuation of Toulon by the British in 1793’. See Richard Altick, The Shows of London, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978, p.129. For discussion of the notion of the flâneur see the essays in Keith Tester ed., The Flâneur, London and New York: Routledge, 1994; and Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Cambridge, Mass. and London: The Belknap Press, 1999.

³⁰ Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, London; New Left Books, 1973, p.36.

³¹ Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century (1990), Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1992, p.113.

© Paul Overy 2003