“An architectural device that provokes self-consciousness, offering that bird’s eye inspection of a common domain that can trigger a sudden spurt of collective energy and ambition. It also offers an additional direction of escape: mass ascension”. This is Rem Koolhaas describing Coney Island in his Delirious New York. More specifically, he describes the perceptive and psychological mechanism generated by a certain tower, more than 90 metres high, which, salvaged from the decommissioning of the Centennial Celebration in Philadelphia, was placed in 1878 in the middle of the newborn “amusement island”, giving those who climbed to its top an enhanced awareness of the future delirious city that the amusement park just below was already prefiguring. Now, let's imagine how powerful this mechanism can become, the moment its generating device starts to move. The moment when it is no longer the people to ascend, but it is the surrounding space to ascend with them.
20 Ferris wheels that made history
From the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition to Ain Dubai, a journey across the history of those fun machines that, born as temporary attractions, are nowadays often conceived as permanent, highly symbolical, architectures.
George Washington Gale Ferris Jr., a bridge engineer, designed the landmark attraction for the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, envisioning for it a similar role to what the Eiffel tower had been in Paris four years earlier. The new attraction was an iron wheel more than 80 metres high, dragging 36 tilting cabins around a complete turn in 20 minutes. Motion was transmitted directly to the rim — as it would happen with all large-radius wheels in history — and the rim was hanged to a central axle through metal spokes, like a bicycle wheel. Its success was immediate and enormous, leaving Ferris wheel as the common name for this attraction. Reassembled at Lincoln Park in Chicago, where the Lumière brothers happened to film it, the wheel was then shown at the World Fair in St Louis, before being demolished in 1906. Photo: Congress Library via picryl.com
A true living fossil of its species, the Giant Wheel of Vienna was built in the Prater amusement park by the British entrepreneur Walter Bassett in 1896, for the Golden Jubilee of Emperor Franz Joseph. It survived a demolition plan 20 years later, and also survived the Second World War, after which its number of cabins was reduced from 30 to 15, and since that last editing it has kept operating until today. This makes it the oldest Ferris wheel still in operation and, since the demolition of the Paris Grande Roue until 1985, has also made it the tallest in the world (approx. 65 meters). Photo: Jannes Klingebiel on Unsplash
The Grande Roue de Paris is another design by Walter Bassett after the Vienna Riesenrad: it was the new attraction that flanked the Tour Efiffel and the Galerie des Machines on the Champ de Mars for the 1900 paris Exposition. It did not immediately take on the legendary value of the neighboring buildings, although for a while it remained the largest wheel in the world (96m); its fame was actually enhanced during the First World War, when thousands of postcards were sent home by American soldiers stationed in Paris who chose to take a panoramic ride. Dismantled in 1920, its 40 cabins were used as temporary housing for war refugees.
Photo: La Grande Roue in a pre-1914 postcard. Prints and Photographs Division, Congress Library. wikimedia commons
The wheel built a century ago by Charles Hermann is not only long-lived. It is also eccentric, and this is not a behavioural detail but a technical one: some of its 24 small cabins can in fact slide along the radius from the outer rim towards the axle. Not monumental in its 46 meter of height, it has nevertheless remained as a true and permanent symbol of the spirit of Coney Island, along with the Luna Park and the Boardwalk, which is why it was awarded the New York City Landmark status in 1989. Photo: Tomas Eidvold on Unsplash
It was built for the Yokohama Exotic Showcase in 1989 and, perfectly in line with the aesthetics of that time, it is also a digital clock, on an urban scale. Born as a 107-meter-high attraction, it reached 112 meters after its relocation to a new base in 1999, and reopened the race for the highest wheel after decades, together with the Technostar in Tsukuba, built four years earlier. Photo: Nico Ga-Ang on Unsplash
In addition to the exceptional nature of the occasion (the new millennium celebration), there is another aspect that makes this 136-meter wheel developed by Arup, something inedited and unique: it is the location to determine its shape and the related technological choices. To allow as unobstructed a view as possible of London from the South Bank where it is located, the wheel is cantilevered. The axle has supports on one side only, and the cabins are glass capsules spinning outside the rim, their rotation on the horizontal axis being activated through an electric motor. This was recognized as a great innovation for the time, and would become a reference for many Ferris wheels in later years. Photo: David Henderson on Unsplash
The location is the main asset also for this wheel, which would otherwise feature rather conventional figures (it is 53 meters high, has 42 air-conditioned cabins): starting from a “ground level” which is a playground in itself — the Clifton Hill area has been developed as a vast tourist attraction — once at the top of its ride users can feel like being dragged away from the city and projected into a total landscape experience, overlooking the Niagara Falls hemicycle. A complete journey in entertainment, expressed both in terms of buildings and nature, as spectacularized as it can be through infrastructures and light shows. Photo via cliftonhill.com
This wheel, which could be nowadays considered as modest with its 26 meters height, is part of Pacific Park, the amusement park on the Santa Monica Pier, and it is the only one in the world to be powered by solar energy. Its first version was already solar-powered, and the 2008 version has increased the general energy efficiency and has been equipped with 174,000 LED lights. Photo: Cameron Venti on Unsplash
The "Bohai Eye" is the world's largest and most spectacular spokeless Ferris Wheel. It reaches a height of 145 metres by hoisting 45 cabins on a 4,600 tonnes steel ring truss. It is installed on the deck of a bridge, the Bailang River Bridge, which opens up a view of the great Bohai Gulf, the deepest inlet of the Yellow Sea. Photo via pixabay.com
The “Eye of Dubai”, operating since October 2021 as the urban symbol of Expo Dubai 2020, is now owning the title of world's largest Ferris wheel, succeeding over the High Roller Observation Wheel in Las Vegas. Developed by Hyundai Engineering & Construction and Starneth Engineering, Ain Dubai reaches 250 metres and can carry up to 1750 passengers simultaneously. It completes the Bluewaters Island project, a residential and commercial complex developed on sea-wrested land between 2013 and 2018, completing the Jumeirah and Dubai Marina coastline, along with the Burj-Al-Arab, and the artificial islands of Palm Jumeirah. Photo: Joel Ambass on Unsplash
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- Giovanni Comoglio
- 02 December 2021
In the meantime, in fact, American engineer George Ferris had created the panoramic wheel for the Chicago World Columbian Exposition in 1893, linking his name forever to the revolving wonder device (known as Ferris Wheel from then on). He patented his project a year after William Somers had installed a wooden panoramic wheel on Coney Island, based on the centuries-old model of the noria, the Ottoman “pleasure wheel”. The founder of Coney's first amusement park, George Tyliou, wanted to buy the Chicago wheel, but it was already sold to others, so he had a similar one built on site.
Wonder and perceptual displacement are probably the reasons why, centuries later, we still pay to board a giant iron ring hoisting us dozens of meters up into the void. But temporariness is also a fundamental characteristic of these devices: mountable and dismountable, they may not belong anywhere after all. Same laws as in the world of entertainment, where they come from. All this is correct until places take their power, until occasions come that can turn a few Ferris wheels into permanent objects of some landscape, conditioning their shape as it happened with the London Eye, involving entire cities in a record race, as in Yokohama, then Las Vegas and finally Dubai. We have selected ten Ferris wheels across the planet to tell us about this not-so-short story of mass ascension, starting with one Expo and ending with another Expo via amusement parks, waterfalls and casinos.
Photo: La Grande Roue in a pre-1914 postcard. Prints and Photographs Division, Congress Library. wikimedia commons