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Buildings and Structures

Selfridges Birmingham

Commercial and Office Buildings

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.

Facts
Building Type
Department store 3
Location
Birmingham, England 3
Completed Year
2003 2
Classification
Standing StatusSourced to the subject's own account
Standing 1
Building Type
Building Type (category)
Commercial / Shop 2
Connections

Has Building Type

Commercial Property, Concepts

Entity-backed identity for the building-type enum value this building already carries, resolved to an architecture concept by an explicit value-to-entity map (phase 3 bucket conversion, docs\design_entity_backed_browse_buckets_20260928.md). The building-type fact itself stays on the building unchanged.

In Style

Blobitecture, Styles and Movements

Future Systems 2003 department store, clad in 15,000 aluminium discs, a defining Blobitecture landmark.

Uses Element

Concrete, Elements and Materials
Source Selfridges Birmingham (Wikipedia)
Steel, Architectural Materials
Source Selfridges Birmingham (Wikipedia)
In the Other Atlases
Sources
1. Selfridges Birmingham (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia Foundation
  • lead paragraph, second sentence
    The building is part of the Bullring Shopping Centre and houses Selfridges Department Store.
  • lead paragraph, first sentence
    The Selfridges Building is a building in Birmingham, England.
  • lead paragraph, completion and cost sentence
    The building was completed in 2003 at a cost of £60 million and designed by the architecture firm Future Systems.
  • Entity description and the lead of the Wikipedia article
    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.
  • Uses Element: Steel, Wikipedia lead
    It has a steel framework with sprayed concrete facade.
  • Uses Element: Concrete, Wikipedia lead
    It has a steel framework with sprayed concrete facade.
View the Source
2. Wikidata: Selfridges Birmingham
  • Wikidata Q7448350, class allow-list match (w-wdresolver-0926)
  • Wikidata Q7448350, P571 claim (w-bbfill-artsarchag-0926)
View the Source
3. Wikipedia
Wikimedia Foundation
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