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]

Similarly space travel – seen in the 1950s as the transport of the future, while space tourism was widely envisaged – has a low profile today. At the 1951 Festival of Britain the main ‘features’ were the Dome of Discovery – which looked like a large grounded ‘flying saucer’, and the Skylon – a structurally dramatic spaceship- or rocket-like structure that embodied contemporary fantasies of a soon-to-be-achieved space travel. [44] An updated version of the Dome of Discovery was the main feature of the London millenary experience, perhaps mistakenly in view of the scorn that was heaped upon it⁴⁵. Almost literally in place of the 1951 Skylon⁴⁶, the Millennium Wheel recuperates and re-invents a symbolic form from the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, promoting an image of modernity for the twenty-first century that at the same time reassures, assuaging the anxieties associated with modern air travel which have become even more acute since 11 September 2001. This may not have been the designers’ original intention, but was clearly perceived as being one of its major qualities and ‘selling’ points by British Airways, who became its sponsors.

New technology does not necessarily render earlier technology obsolete (particularly in the realm of media or representation) but often gives it a new lease of life. The mechanized moving panoramas of 1900 competed with the new medium of the cinema which had not then reached its full spectacular potential. Even in the late 1930s when the cinema had already attained a highly sophisticated mode of representation with the commercial introduction of sound and colour, up-dated versions of the moving panorama could still find commercial sponsors and attract enormous audiences. One of the most successful was Futurama, designed by Norman Bel Geddes for the General Motors pavilion at the New York World’s Fair of 1939. Seated in comfortable airline seats round a circular auditorium, visitors were shown an animated vision of what American cities would look like in 1960 as viewed from a low-flying airplane. Futurama was visited by 27 million people, many of whom queued for up to two hours. Bel Geddes commented in retrospect that: ‘This is more people than ever saw any motion picture, more people than attended all baseball games in the country those same two summers, and three-quarters of the total attendance of the New York’s World Fair’[47]. De Cauter’s comment that the 1900 ‘Le Tour de Monde’ represented ‘the last of the panoramic gaze’ is far from the truth⁴⁸.

Perhaps in response to the ‘modernity’ of the London Eye the Vienna Riesenrad has recently been given an updated setting or ‘frame’ which incorporates the experience of the panorama into that of a ride on the Wheel. The area at the base of the Riesenrad where the public enter the cabins has been newly enclosed in a shiny brightly coloured new structure (known as the RiesenRäderwerk) designed by the young Swiss architect Mathis Barz, who trained at the Architectural Association in London and at the ETH in Zurich⁴⁹. This contains a new ticket office, a café-restaurant, a gift shop, and a pavilion devoted to dioramas and panoramas chronicling the history of Vienna via the history of the Prater through which passengers pass on their way to board the Wheel. Eight simulated Riesenrad cabins arranged in the form of the spokes of a slowly moving wheel (‘The Wheel of Time’)[50] display panoramic representations of eight major phases in the Prater and Vienna’s two-thousand-year history, with audio as well as visual effects⁵¹. These form a direct link with the Prater’s history as a pleasure garden and amusement park. There were panoramas in the Prater from 1801 to the end of the nineteenth century. A special panorama was installed as part of the Jubilee Exhibition celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Franz Joseph’s accession in 1898 for which the Riesenrad was originally constructed. A publicity booklet for the newly revamped Riesenrad claims that:

While leaflets and newspapers present events in a fragmented form, the panorama brings them all together into one great compilation of genre images, a total work of art for the eye and ear, for the heart and brain together, making developments understandable for what they were. Panoramas represent the collective memory of the general public of their time, with just the same authenticity as films do today⁵².

After passing through the panoramas, visitors mount the steps to the loading platform and file into the cabins of the Riesenrad to experience the ‘real’ panorama of Vienna spread out before them. Twenty minutes later they exit through the gift shop where souvenirs can be purchased including a wide range of models of the Wheel, T-shirts, ceramics and other mementoes. Before these new pavilions were erected a variety of related experiences were open to visitors to the Riesenrad: souvenir shops, a Prater museum (still extant just behind the Wheel), restaurants, cafés and the further ‘attractions’ of the Würstelprater⁵³. But to visit these or not was up to the visitors themselves. Now in order to board and leave the Wheel they have to go through a pre-ordained sequence of experiences: the panorama pavilion, the souvenir shop, the café restaurant, before finally passing out into the Prater. Both the Prater (presented through the panoramas in the pavilion as a synecdoche of Vienna’s past and collective memory) and the Riesenrad itself (as emblem of the city) are mediated between present and past, ‘representation’ and ‘reality’ by means of this newly designed and carefully controlled ritual of entering and leaving the Wheel.

This presents a very different experience from that of riding the Wheel in the late 1940s following its repair and restoration after the Second World War⁵⁴ In the famous scene on the Riesenrad in The Third Man (1949), Holly Martins the American writer (played by Joseph Cotton) meets the corrupt but charming racketeer Harry Lime (Orson Welles) in one of the cabins. Together the two men rise slowly above the still shattered and as yet unreconstructed city beneath them⁵⁵. ‘Seriously old boy’, says Harry Lime looking down on the ant-like human figures beneath the cabin, ‘would you really worry if one of those dots stopped moving?’ Lime, whose racket is selling watered-down penicillin, suggests that the Wheel and by implication other modern mechanisms and machines reduce human beings to anonymous specks. He justifies his own callous attitude to human life and makes derogatory remarks about the Swiss who ‘had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce … The cuckoo clock?’[56]

Lime, an American who is exploiting Europeans in the aftermath of the Second World War, ridicules and disparages European achievements. When it first appeared on the Vienna skyline in 1897 the Riesenrad was perceived as representing American modernity and know-how, despite the fact that like all the Great Wheels erected in Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century it was built by the British engineer Walter Bassett from components manufactured in Britain by Maudslay, Sons and Field⁵⁷. During the last decade of the nineteenth century English and American style and technological expertise were often conflated in Europe as emblems of modernity – for example by Adolf Loos who jointly praised English men’s tailoring and American plumbing in his essays of the late 1890s. Half a century later The Third Man, an Anglo-American co-production of the late 1940s, depicted the Americans and the British (in the character of Major Calloway, played by Trevor Howard) as dominating a devastated Europe, whether by means of crooked deals like Lime, or by the enforcement of law and order like Calloway. By contrast, the French and Russian occupying forces – with whom the Americans and British jointly administered a partitioned Austria (and Vienna) at the time – are depicted as absurd caricatures.

In the twenty-first century Europe is no longer devastated and its most prosperous member states are united in the EC and NATO. Although British-designed, the Millennium Wheel is constructed from components manufactured in several European countries. The steel structure was fabricated in the Netherlands, the hub and spindle cast by Skoda in Czechoslovakia, the capsules were manufactured in France, and the complex curved glass with which they are glazed in Italy. In this the Wheel resembles the European Airbus, the individual components of which are manufactured in different European countries and assembled in France, the only airplane made today that can challenge American world domination of the passenger aircraft manufacturing industry.

Not only is the Millennium Wheel a viewing machine that simulates ascension and flight fusing fragmented perceptions with spectacular overviews of the city, it is also a symbol of modern multi-national technologies and corporations, of commercial co-operation and the technical expertise of its ‘expert’ engineers, architects and publicists. Combining the ‘individual flair’ of its relatively unknown designers with corporate sponsorship and multi-national co-operation, it is as much a product and a symbol of the enterprise capitalism of the early twenty-first century as the Ferris Wheel was of that of the late nineteenth century. The Millennium Wheel is a highly complex and sophisticated piece of machinery that projects a simplified but powerful image of itself while controlling and masking the impact of modernity – subordinating it to its own slow and stately pace. More than an emblem of twenty-first-century London and a sophisticated optical viewing machine, it is also an apt demonstration of late capitalism’s narcissistic delight in the contemplation of its own spectacle.

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Notes [cont’d]

⁴⁴ In form this was very similar to the spaceship captained by Dan Dare, the hero of a futuristic strip in the British children’s comic of the early 1950s, The Eagle.

⁴⁵ Although initially conceived under John Major’s Conservative government, the new Blair administration adopted the project soon after being elected to power in 1997 to signify New Labour’s voluntarist vision of a competitive and meritocratic enterprise culture, although this strategy badly misfired. While some of the individual stands and pavilions inside the Millennium Dome were interesting structures in their own right (and the Dome itself had some of the architectural and engineering qualities of its 1951 predecessor) the organisers failed to appreciate that between 1951 and 2000 the medium of the Great Exhibition had largely been rendered redundant by new media such as television, video and IT.

⁴⁶ The Wheel occupies a position on the Thames very close to that of the Skylon in the 1951 exhibition.

⁴⁷ Norman Bel Geddes, ‘Autobiography of Norman Bel Geddes’ nd. Norman Bel Geddes Collection, AF-1, The University of Texas at Austin, Harry Ransome Humanities Research Center, quoted in Robert W. Rydell, World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993, p.135. The 1939 New York World’s Fair continued to be open through 1940.

⁴⁸ De Cauter, ‘The Panoramic Ecstasy’, p.15.

⁴⁹ The Federal Institute of Technology, the premier Swiss architectural school. The forms of the new entrance structures are based on the Reuleux triangle, an equilateral triangle with curving sides.

⁵⁰ At night the Riesenrad also now features colour and light displays by the British light artist Patrick Woodroffe including searchlights and light installations, and every hour on the hour the Wheel becomes ‘a giant clock of light’.

⁵¹ The eight phases are the Roman era, the Middle Ages, the war against the Turks, the Enlightenment period under the Emperor Joseph II (who opened the former imperial hunting park of the Prater to the public in 1766), the Biedermeier era of the early nineteenth century, the later nineteenth-century period of the World Exhibition in Vienna 1873 and the exoticist simulation of ‘Venice in Vienna’ during the 1890s, the fin de siècle or Secession period at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the period from the 1920s to the end of the Second World war and the near destruction of the Wheel. (Two of the Riesenrad’s cabins have for some years been available for group or party hire, one decorated in Biedermeier the other in Secession style. Individual cabins of the London Eye can also be privately hired.)

⁵² ‘Wiener Riesenrad: Tradition die bewegt./A moving tradition.’ Publicity leaflet, 2002.

⁵³ This part of the Prater is traditionally known as the Würstelprater, not apparently because of the sausages (Wurste) sold there but named after Hans Wurst, a Punch- or clown-like character who featured in puppet shows in the park. Like London’s Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, the Prater (the name of which derives from prado the Spanish for meadow) was a public space of social differentiation. The park’s main boulevard, the Hauptallee, was a site of display for the upper and upper-middle classes, the Würstelprater – also known as the Volksprater (the people’s Prater) – a place of entertainment for the lower-middle and working classes. Other areas of the Prater were mainly frequented by the respectable bourgeoisie, although like most large city parks and open spaces the Prater was (and still is) a venue for prostitutes and their clients and for homosexual encounters, especially after dark.

⁵⁴ Following the German annexation of Austria in 1938 the then owner of the Riesenrad Eduard Steiner had been forced to cede ownership of the Wheel to an ‘Aryan’ consortium and was later murdered in Auschwitz in June 1944. In 1945 a state-controlled company took over the ruined Wheel and rebuilt it in 1946-1947. In 1953 it was returned to the ownership of Steiner’s heirs. It now belongs to the heirs of Dr Karl Lamac who acquired the company in 1961. Jahn and Petritsch, The Vienna Giant Ferris Wheel, p.19, p.24-25.

⁵⁵ The sequence of Welles and Cotten meeting on the Riesenrad was not filmed on location in Vienna but at Shepperton studios near London against a back projection of the Wheel and the view of Vienna behind and from it. See Charles Drazin, In Search of the Third Man, London: Methuen, 1999, p.83.

⁵⁶ Apparently the American producer David O. Selznick was worried that this ‘might be considered Communist propaganda’. Drazin, In Search, pp.135 and 136. This line is often said to have been written by Welles himself rather than by the scriptwriter Graham Greene. Drazin suggests that it is derived from a passage in James McNeill Whistler’s ‘Ten o’clock’ lecture’ delivered on 20 February 1885. Drazin, In Search, p.75.

⁵⁷ The Riesenrad was erected in 1896-1897. The components were delivered from England via the Vienna Nordbahnhof, which is very close to the Prater. The Wheel was assembled in 8 months by 14 English and 100 Austrian workers. The 16.3 metric ton axle manufactured by W. Beardmore and Company of Glasgow was transported from the Nordbahnhof in a wagon drawn by sixteen horses. In the ‘topping out’ ceremony on June 1897 the English ambassador’s wife Lady Horace Rumbold knocked the last bolt into place. Jahn and Petritsch, The Vienna Giant Ferris Wheel, p.37, p.10.

© Paul Overy 2003