Wonder Wheel was created for Souvenirs: New New York Icons, the second iteration of Storefront for Art & Architecture’s model exhibition, which commissioned more than fifty-nine objects reimagining New York City’s iconic imagery through the lens of its Community Districts. Standing in for Coney Island, our project draws from the area’s long history as a testing ground for spectacle, amusement, and excess—where electric lights, gravity-defying rides, and sideshow theatrics coexist without hierarchy.

Rather than reproducing a single landmark, Wonder Wheel operates as a souvenir of experience. Somewhere between a snow globe and a gumball machine, the model condenses a series of small interactions—sliding, dropping, blinking—into a compact, participatory object. It is intentionally over the top, reflecting Coney Island’s indifference to whether delight is produced through sophisticated technology or crude mechanics, so long as it provokes curiosity and surprise.

The piece is meant to be handled rather than observed. Its movements are exaggerated and unnecessary, performing for no reason other than to capture attention and hold it longer than expected. In this way, Wonder Wheel aligns itself with the tradition of interactive amusements that value time-wasting as a form of pleasure rather than inefficiency.

Like Coney Island itself, the object embraces contradiction—part homage, part delirious experiment. Considerable technical effort is expended to achieve effects that feel willfully dumb, celebrating indulgence over optimization. The hope is simple: that visitors spend more time with the object than they intended to, savoring confusion, amusement, and idle engagement as experiences worth having.