Selfridges Birmingham

The Selfridges Building in Birmingham, England, is a department store built as part of the Bullring Shopping Centre, designed by the architects Jan Kaplicky and Amanda Levete of the firm Future Systems and completed in September 2003 at a cost of about 60 million pounds. Its structure is a steel framework coated in sprayed concrete, wrapped in a smooth, windowless facade of some 15,000 anodized aluminum discs mounted on a blue background, an approach that has been described as blobitecture for its rounded, biomorphic form rather than conventional flat walls and corners. The building rises six floors and holds about 14,864 square meters of floor area, and its curved silhouette has made it one of Birmingham's most recognized modern landmarks, appearing among the default desktop backgrounds distributed with Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system under an architecture theme.