BROKEN SECRETS

Selfridges department store in Birmingham, England, is iconic. The building is softly undulating. The facade is comprised of aluminum discs that reflect the ambient light.

I ran across this article in The Birmingham Daily Mail, which states:

“It is even something of a tourist attraction in its own right, with Tripadvisor reviewers hailing it as  showpiece for Birmingham.  But do you know what the real inspiration was for the striding facade, which is wrapped in 15,000 spun anodised aluminum discs?  It was actually a famous 1960s chainmail Baco Rabanne dress – the Birmingham Mail broke the story exclusively in 2003 – and its organic shape is intended to evoke the silhouette of a woman.”

Wow.  Really?  The inspiration was some sort of secret?  And this story was then broken?

The building is iconic.  The design inspiration should not be a secret that had to be broken.  That is ridiculous.  Tell the Creation Story!  Yet it sums up our current mindset, in which the inspiration for buildings is never really discussed or taught.

When I learned that a dress indeed was the inspiration for the building, I thought, ok, cool.  This fits in exactly with my House Dress series.  So I’ll do a transparent study of the building as if it were, indeed a unified whole.

I have no idea how this building is now presented in any architectural history book.  But I’ll bet anything that there is not any mention of it’s inspiration.  If we all had our heads on straight, that history book would have two photos.  One would  be the iconic flashcard image.  And the other would be of an iconic chain mail dress.

As is usually the case, with a Transparent Drawing mindset, we learn, sometimes, more than we want to.  In fact, the glistening, reflecting, undulating facade comprises about half of the building.  The rest of the building is plugged into a typically mediocre retail fabric.

You have to dig long and hard on the web to find images that show the sleek facade butting up next to a dumb brick big box.  So while photographers wish to show the building as if it is a standalone gestalt within our culturally mandated flashcard mentality,  wouldn’t it be really interesting to show photos of how this incredible facade exists within the typically mundane and mediocre retail fabric?

1.  Halifax, Justine. “The 1960’s Dress That Inspired Iconic Design.” 12 May 2015 Birmingham Mail. birminghammail.com.uk. Web. 6 November 2017.