Big wheels keep on turning

The Dublin Wheel in the city's docklands is giving us a reason to look up – and also to look down on the architectural landscape of our capital. Big wheels and tall buildings define cities, so what does the wheel tell us about ours, writes GEMMA TIPTON

WHILE IT is still a new attraction, and before the nicknames stick – the Eye Soar and Pi in the Sky have already been suggested – it’s a good time to look at what the Dublin Wheel may actually mean, as a visitor attraction, but also for the architectural landscape. Any addition to a city changes the nature of the space around it, and big wheels can have a significant effect. If this is true of the Dublin Wheel, it is even more so of the London Eye which, at 135 metres, is over twice the height of our new 60 metre wheel.

Rising slowly up, the city is gradually revealed. It is a little like going up the side of a tall building in a bubble lift, but more thrilling, as the views are 360 degrees. Street level changes to eye level and, as you ascend, you begin to see buildings as they must once have appeared in architects’ models and city plans, except for here, the model buildings, trees and people are real. The river flows through its curves and the city turns into a living map as relationships between place and space are made plain. You see into the parts of buildings, squares, yards and gardens that are normally obscured by façades, and it is as if secrets are being exposed.

On the subject of secrets, the London Eye gives excellent views of the MI6 building at Vauxhall, although it’s unlikely architect Terry Farrell was allowed to create any chinks in the visual armour of that edifice – from any point of view.

Big wheels and ideas of secrecy have gone hand in hand since Vienna's Riesenrad at Prater Park featured in Carol Reed's 1949 masterpiece The Third Man. Holly Martins, played by Joseph Cotten, ascends in one of the wheel's gondolas with Harry Lime (Orson Welles). "Have you ever seen any of your victims?" asks Martins. Lime responds: "Victims? Don't be melodramatic. Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you £20,000 for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?"

JUST AS PENTHOUSES and top floor offices are associated with omnipotence, status and prestige, height gives delusions of grandeur. Height is also symbolic, and as cities rush to put themselves on the global map through building, one advantage of a big wheel is that at least it is a temporary intervention.

Dublin is not going to acquire a claim to fame by having the world’s tallest building, this accolade is currently held by the Burj Khalifa in Dubai (828 metres), and anyway, skyscrapers can make bad neighbours: their downdrafts cause wind tunnels. The effects of this were first fully realised in New York in 1902, when one of the contenders for world’s first skyscraper, the Flatiron Building, needed policemen posted at its base, to stop men loitering in wait for women’s skirts to blow up around their waists.

The surrounding streets, and the plinth on which the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center once stood, were always windswept unwelcoming places, though standing on the observation deck of the South Tower once, in the late 1990s, I remember feeling a thrill of power-tinged awe as I looked down on the teeming city from my great height.

Having an instantly recognisable icon to promote visitor recognition is a holy grail of city planning.

Paris has the Eiffel Tower, New York the Empire State Building, and London the House of Commons with Big Ben. Dublin’s Ha’penny Bridge and Spire aren’t quite there, and in fact you can gauge the measure of a structure’s success as an icon if it is blown up, damaged or otherwise featured in a film.

After King Kong climbed the Empire State in 1933, it set a trend. The London Eye reached this level of success with Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, and also in an episode of Doctor Who. Portsmouth’s Spinnaker Tower (170 metres), opened in 2005 at a cost of £35.6 million, aiming at a similar level of fame, but has only achieved brief BBC TV appearances on Blue Peter and Children in Need.

“EVERY CITY HAS A SEX and an age,” wrote the English critic John Berger, “which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and, in this, hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.”

If cities have their sexes, so too do buildings, and while skyscrapers are definitely male – can you imagine a stronger phallic symbol? – big wheels are female. So too, I suspect, is Dublin, although the addition of the Spire in 2002 did make me wonder.

Recent planning design and decisions mean Dublin is not due any significantly tall buildings in the foreseeable future, so the Dublin Wheel remains one of the best ways to get a different sense of the city.

One thing that is immediately seen is all the wasted space we have due to not understanding the aerial aspect of our buildings. We can maybe blame the weather, but Dublin is remarkably short of roof terraces, gardens and greenhouses.

Focussing our attention on street level, we have forgotten to look up, and a whole dimension is lost. We don’t have to build up, but it’s about time Dublin reached for the stars.

Size Matters Big wheels, big buildings

The Singapore Flyer is the current biggest wheel in the world at 208 metres. The London Eye is the largest in the Western Hemisphere.

At 324 metres, the Eiffel Tower was the tallest structure in the world when it was built in 1889. It is still the second tallest in France, following the Millau Bridge, in 2004. Driving over the Millau has been likened to "flying a car".

The original Ferris Wheel was built for the Chicago World Fair in 1893 by George Washington Ferris Jr, with a height of 80.5 metres, to rival the Eiffel Tower as an icon. "Pleasure wheels" existed before that, and may have originated in Seventeenth Century Bulgaria.

Tallest structure in the world is the Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai, right, at 828 metres.

The Spire of Dublin aka the Monument of Light measures in at 121.2 metres. Liberty Hall is 59.4 metres, and Millennium Tower at Grand Canal Dock, also in Dublin is 63 metres.