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Future Systems’ new building for Selfridges in Birmingham puts new life into the department store, a 19th century institution that has been in decline for decades. Text by Deyan Sudjic. Photography by Richard Davies.

To judge by Jan Kaplicky and Amanda Levete of Future Systems’ Selfridges in Birmingham, the department store – which has been having something of a hard time of late, like other 19th-century architectural inventions such as the railway station and the stock exchange – may be on the edge of a revival. Paris’s original Bon Marché, created by Aristide Boucicault after 1850 and designed by Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel and Louis Boileau, was where the theatrical form of modern consumerism celebrated in Emile Zola’s Au Bonheur des dames was born. This was the first of the great department stores, where the emerging bourgeois class could learn how to furnish a home tastefully, find what polite society considered fashionable and, with written prices displayed for the first time, be liberated from the vulgar necessity of bargaining for goods.

From the start, the department store was much more of a social experience than a place to buy the functional necessities. Selfridges has enjoyed a notable financial turnaround in the last five years under the leadership of Vittorio Radice, a gifted Italian retailer who revitalized Selfridges by going back to the origins of the department store. Selfridges has rediscovered a theatrical sense of spectacle in which architecture is an essential ingredient.

Macy’s was once ready to clear out an entire floor to stage an indoor golf tournament. But since the 1960s, Western department stores have been in decline, running out of the ideas and showmanship that made them popular in the first place. Only in Japan in the bubble years did the department store continue to flourish, offering van Gogh exhibitions and British butlers in tailcoats serving cucumber sandwiches.

The hollowing out of European and American cities from the 1960s onward left the department store vulnerable. The retailer’s move to the mall has undermined the basis of the architectural grandiloquence of Daniel Burnham’s palatial 1908 store for Gordon Selfridge in London, Henry Hobson Richardson’s reworking of the arcades of the Pitti Palace for Marshall Field’s in Chicago or Louis Sullivan’s design for Carson Pirie Scott. Most of the survivors have suffered years of neglect that has left them looking threadbare and out of date. At the same time, the rise of the designer label has tended to shift the balance of power and prestige away from the department store. It is now Prada, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Calvin Klein or Armani that make the big architectural statements, while the department store has shrivelled into generic anonymity. Many have closed altogether, to be carved up as shopping malls, while some have shrunk into faded, threadbare shadows of the spectacular places they once were. And the more that department stores look like any other kind of shop, the more their market share has dropped and the more they have spiralled into decline.

Radice set out to make Selfridges nothing like anywhere else. The window displays featured designs by Ron Arad. There were Japanese weeks and gigantic art projects that involved hundreds of volunteers stripping naked. It was corny, but it worked. So much so that Selfridges has begun to expand outside London. There’s an outpost in Manchester, and Toyo Ito is working on the design of a new store in Glasgow. But it is the newly completed store in Birmingham, designed by Future Systems, that is the most impressive.

Birmingham is England’s second city, a shapeless product of the industrial revolution. Ever since the country lost interest in manufacturing, it has seemed to be locked in the same downward spiral of decline as the department store. Perhaps the worst moment came at the end of the 1960s, as Birmingham attempted a wholesale modernization, demolishing large swathes of its centre to make way for urban expressways and crude new buildings. It was a misguided policy, which the city is only now beginning to put right by pulling down many of the troublesome teenage buildings of the recent past, re-establishing the urban fabric and doing all it can to dispel the bleak identity of an industrial city gone to seed.

The new Selfridges forms part of an aimless new shopping mall close to the city’s main railway station and next to its street market. Next door is a florid Victorian church and an isolated Pop-style tower block. But in reality, there is next to no architectural context. What attracted Radice’s interest when the developers came to offer space in what was still a project on the drawing board was the chance it offered to follow in the footsteps of the company’s founder, Gordon Selfridge, who had brought Daniel Burnham to England and commissioned an architectural landmark.

Selected after an informal competition, Future Systems’ design looks as if it belongs to a different universe from the mall to which it is attached. It sits on the southern end of the site, tightly hemmed in by roads on the edge of high ground that rapidly falls away, leaving it highly visible. At the top of the hill is the conventional pastel-coloured neo-postmodernism of an utterly conventional shopping centre. Selfridges erupts from one end to create an instantly recognizable landmark. To a remarkable extent, Selfridges is the realization of a 20-year-old montage by Jan Kaplicky, Future Systems’ founding partner. Kaplicky delights in exploring the possibilities of a world beyond the mundane restrictions of the present. Working within the parameters of the shopping centre, onto which the Selfridges store opens on two levels, Future Systems has built a giant blue bubble studded with hundreds of aluminium discs that make it look like one of Courrèges’ metal dresses from the 1960s or a giant enlargement of a fly’s eye. Future Systems is normally discussed in terms of turbo-charged high technology, but it is clear that what really characterizes them is a passion for making arresting shapes exploiting imagery that is unfamiliar in an architectural context. The store belongs to a family of objects that has ideas in common with the work of Claes Oldenburg or Anish Kapoor, the latter of whom has in fact collaborated with Future Systems. Selfridges, however, is more than a sculptural object. It skilfully exploits changes of level and nuances of light and shade as they fall on the twisting contours of its surface. Its wraparound curves certainly create an unforgettable impression, but the expectations aroused by the exterior are fulfilled by the interior, which is just as much of a departure from the norms of retailing. In addition to Future Systems, which also designed the food hall on the lower level, Selfridges has worked with Aldo Cibic, Stanton Williams and Eldridge and Smerin.

Department stores do not, by and large, make extensive use of windows, which tend to get in the way of their efforts to seduce customers. But Selfridges’ interior is planned around two big atriums that bring sunlight deep into the interior. Furthermore, there are gouges cut into the skin at street level to create windows for passers-by, higher up to allow access to the car park across the road by way of a Future Systems-designed bridge and also to create a terrace for the restaurant.

Selfridges’ discs have become shorthand for the store and for the new Birmingham, in a way that is instantly understood throughout the city. It is a powerful example of the way that architecture can be used to create a sense of identity. Deyan Sudjic
Selfridges forms part of a large scale redevelopment of Birmingham’s city centre. It replaces an unloved shopping centre built in the 1960s, of which the circular tower is the only surviving fragment
Selfridges forms part of a large scale redevelopment of Birmingham’s city centre. It replaces an unloved shopping centre built in the 1960s, of which the circular tower is the only surviving fragment
Site boundaries are defined by the Victorian church, right, around which the developer’s have created a new public space, a busy road to the south, and the rest of the shopping mall to which the department store is linked
Site boundaries are defined by the Victorian church, right, around which the developer’s have created a new public space, a busy road to the south, and the rest of the shopping mall to which the department store is linked
Ad attirare la curiosità dei passanti è la serie di finestre aperte sul piano strada, simili ad avvolgenti occhiali da sole. Il ponte disegnato da Future Systems collega l’edificio al vicino parcheggio
Ad attirare la curiosità dei passanti è la serie di finestre aperte sul piano strada, simili ad avvolgenti occhiali da sole. Il ponte disegnato da Future Systems collega l’edificio al vicino parcheggio
The lack of any conventional architectural elements makes it hard to read the scale of the building. 
In fact it is a relatively modest five floors high
The lack of any conventional architectural elements makes it hard to read the scale of the building. In fact it is a relatively modest five floors high
Kaplicky cites precedents for the skin of the building in naturally occuring geometry like a fly’s eye and even in baroque masonry
Kaplicky cites precedents for the skin of the building in naturally occuring geometry like a fly’s eye and even in baroque masonry
Paco Rabanne’s metallic dress also made a mark on Future Systems’s design
Paco Rabanne’s metallic dress also made a mark on Future Systems’s design
Future Systems designed the food hall, and the escalators, while a range of designers worked on individual departments
Future Systems designed the food hall, and the escalators, while a range of designers worked on individual departments
There are two atria designed to bring sun into the heart of the store, and to encourage shoppers to move up to the higher floors
There are two atria designed to bring sun into the heart of the store, and to encourage shoppers to move up to the higher floors
In spite of its unconventional form, Selfridges provides a surprisingly sympathetic setting for its gothic neighbour. The really abrupt contrast is with the rest of the shopping centre of which it forms part
In spite of its unconventional form, Selfridges provides a surprisingly sympathetic setting for its gothic neighbour. The really abrupt contrast is with the rest of the shopping centre of which it forms part

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