Selfridges Level 2, Birmingham

Eldridge Smerin Architects designed the ‘Selfridges Level 2, Birmingham’ in United Kingdom.

Description from the architects:

Fresh concepts playing an active role within the dynamic retail experience of the radical new Selfridges store in Birmingham: Eldridge Smerin’s design for the building’s ‘Spirit’ floor is a rigorous and versatile landscape of shopping cultures and leisure product types appealing to a broad cross section of people in an accessible and non-elitist way.

Vittorio Radice, Selfridges’ chief executive was inspired by the practice’s project for BT Cellnet at Ealing Studios, and commissioned Eldridge Smerin to design the entire floor. Thorough research and a desire to tell compelling stories created the dramatic setting. Two organising strategies structure the space: a main circulation route looping round the entire floor, and a parallelogram grid providing a matrix that gives positioning to individual shopping plots at floor level, lighting and other services. A series of enclosing walls of varying heights define and characterise the main shopping departments.

The Fashion departments with their individual clothing collections host the seasonally shifting fashion collections. Laid out like fields in a landscape, their transitory marketplace feel is unified by a smooth resin floor. The white finish to the exposed structure of the ceiling and services reflects and diffuses the strong daylight pouring into the atrium from the glass roof, reinforcing the naturalistic landscape quality of this part of the floor. Playing on the theme of the ‘ready made’, the fixture designs include flexible conveyor belts and large elliptical silver fabric photographic reflectors applied to the light fittings.