The London Eye, also known as the Millennium Wheel, is the tallest (135 metres (443 ft)) Ferris wheel in Europe, and has become the most popular paid tourist attraction in the UK, visited by over 3 million people a year.
It is an observation wheel that provides a bird's eye view of London...
It rotates at 26 cm (10 in) per second (about 0.9 km/h (0.5mph) so that one revolution takes about 30 minutes. The wheel does not usually stop to take on passengers: the rotation rate is so slow that they can easily walk on and off the moving capsules at ground level. It is, however, stopped to allow disabled or elderly passengers time to embark and disembark safely.
Sir Richard Rogers, winner of the 2007 Pritzker Architecture Prize, wrote of the London Eye in a recent book about the project,
The Eye has done for London what the Eiffel Tower did for Paris, which is to give it a symbol and to let people climb above the city and look back down on it. Not just specialists or rich people, but everybody. That's the beauty of it: it is public and accessible, and it is in a great position at the heart of London. ”
Writing for G2 in an article from August 2007, Steve Rose described the Eye as follows,
The Eye... exists in a category of its own.... It essentially has to fulfil only one function, and what a brilliantly inessential function it is: to lift people up from the ground, take them round a giant loop in the sky, then put them back down where they started. That is all it needs to do, and thankfully, that is all it does.
0 comments:
Post a Comment