UK company Embrace Building Wraps has completed the world’s largest building wrap after installing the final section of a digitally printed banner covering temporary scaffolding at the iconic Selfridges department store in Birmingham.
The striking dogtooth design wrap measures almost 9,000 m2 - 58% bigger than the current Guinness World Record holder for the largest scaffold banner, which was installed in Madrid in 2018.
Installation of the frames and wrap, which will disguise work during renovations, started on site at the end of December 2020. The digitally printed banner features artwork by Birmingham-born designer Osman Yousefzada, comprising of interlocking six metre diameter dog tooth flower designs in three contrasting colours.
The Embrace Building Wraps team installed 5,888 linear metres of scaffold tubes in Birmingham for the banner frames, vertical curved shaping, and buffer rails. If laid end to end, the scaffold tubes would extend around six kilometres. The weight of the printed wraps alone is just under five tonnes.
Embrace joined 24 individual banners of which 85% had three or more adjoining perimeter edges that had to line up perfectly with the adjacent banners.
“If you have ever tried lining up wallpaper then this is supersized to another level as the average dimensions of each individual banner are 388 m2,” said Greg Forster, managing director of Embrace Building Wraps. “At the extremes, our wrap is 246 metres long & 37 metres high – equivalent to a giant wall of nineteen double-decker buses stacked eight high.”
The Selfridges building at the Birmingham Bull Ring shopping centre is undergoing major renovations which are due to complete ahead of the Commonwealth Games in 2022.
