The iconic Selfridges building in Birmingham city centre, covered in disks of stainless steel designed by Future Systems
The new Selfridges store in Birmingham, although firmly anchored to the new-look Birmingham Bull Ring, proves to be not so much architecture-as-ocean-liner berthed alongside Moor Street station, but a vast cliff of a building, a computer-age geological outcrop, as distinctive and eye-catching as the white cliffs of Dover. Its high, billowing form might have been moulded by some smooth yet insistent sea over the four years it has taken to build. Yet the only sea here is one of constant traffic, dominated by deregulated buses painted colours brighter and more lurid than anything found beside or beneath the ocean. Seagulls, on the day of my visit last week, wheeled noisily above the store, adding to the coastal feel of this remarkable building. Four storeys high, and wrapped in a sinuous, seamless outer skin decorated with 15,000 spun aluminium discs painted blue, like some XXXL dress by Paco Rabanne, Selfridges is a truly audacious achievement. Designed by Future Systems, architects of the Space Age-style press pavilion at Lord's cricket ground in St John's Wood, it has about it, from the outside at least, not just something of a Pop era frock, but something of the sea and even the ocean depths - something, too, of outer space exploration. All this, believe it or not, is to its credit. Seen from almost any nook and corner viewpoint in central Birmingham, this unexpected building - unclassifiable in neat, art-historical terms - is all but guaranteed to raise a smile. An ersatz urban cliff, a giant sea anenome, a friendly, blob-like alien, the mother of all magic mushrooms, this is the department store as unalloyed architectural entertainment. Some people will find it over the top. Others will see it as part of the trend for architects to design ever more outlandishly wobbly buildings as they rush to get away from the strictures of the T-square, the straight line and the grid. Shoppers might well look upon it as Catholics do Gaudi's Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.
Size: 3220px × 5660px
Location: Birmingham West Midlands England UK
Photo credit: © Pat Savage / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
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