Selfridges Building, Birmingham

Birmingham demolished its 1960s Bull Ring and, in rebuilding it, Selfridges' chief executive Vittorio Radice asked Future Systems for a store worth travelling to. Jan Kaplický and Amanda Levete gave him a building with no façade, no windows and no straight lines: a soft bulging mass that leans over the pavement, drops to meet the churchyard of St Martin's, and is skinned in some fifteen thousand anodised aluminium discs mounted proud of a blue-rendered surface, so that the whole thing shifts and glitters as the light changes. The form was buildable only because computer-aided design allowed a steel frame to be wrapped in sprayed concrete, a technique closer to tunnelling than to retail. Inside, the interest is a pair of atria crossed by escalators; outside is deliberately blank, a shop that sells itself as an object on the skyline instead of through a window display. It was completed in 2003 at a cost of about £60 million, and it turned the tail end of Birmingham's city centre into a destination.