One of Australia’s leading regional art galleries, the Orange Regional Gallery, has solved two problems with the one installation of a classic 2.4m Boon Edam Tourniket revolving door at its main entrance.
The striking black-frame 2.4m diameter door – installed as part of the gallery’s $5 million upgrade to serve the local community and booming tourist traffic – incorporates the same ‘always open, always closed’ weather protection and energy conservation functionality as identical Boon Edam door designs installed in some of the world’s leading galleries and visitor hot spots.
We wanted to be welcoming and comfortable to both tourists and the local community, particularly older people, those with disability, and parents with young children,” said Gallery Services Coordinator, Claire Buchanan. “Orange can be extremely hot in summer and very cold in winter, below freezing.”
“Our architect for the upgrade – Sam Marshall from Architect Marshall in Sydney – helped us by specifying the Tourniket door to replace the previous sliding doors, which cold winds whipped through during winter, and which were open to the stifling heat in summer,” she said.
“Not only did the new entrance get rid of the discomfort of the previous entrances, which blew hot or cold depending on the time of the year, but it has also taken the pressure off the HVAC system, which had to work hard to replace losses of heated or cooled air.”
Style meets comfort
“We have found it to be easy to operate and very reliable in service,” she said of the striking black framed Tourniket door selected for the Orange extension, which is identical in design to Boon Edam entrances used in major cultural centres worldwide. These include the entrances to internationally famous facilities extending from Hamlet’s Castle in Denmark to multiple image and comfort-conscious galleries worldwide, including the Mauritshuis in the Netherlands, home to works of Rembrandt and Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring.
Boon Edam Australia Managing Director Michael Fisher says, “In addition to being a statement of style, revolving doors provide very strong facilities management benefits, including comfortable exclusion of exterior noise, exclusions of unhealthy exterior allergens, and exclusions of extremes of exterior heat, cold or wind.”
Fisher says the automatic energy-saving Tourniket selected for the Orange extension is particularly appropriate for the welcoming, open plan gallery, which greets visitors with a wide range of contemporary artworks and travelling exhibitions. The spacious gallery hosts works extending from the gritty but beautiful reality of the aftermath to bushfires on the Central Coast in 2009, through to Brett Whiteley’s peaceful and dreamlike rendition of a yellow willow.
“Because of their ‘always open, always closed’ operating principle, they are ideal for public facilities such as the Orange gallery, offering a hushed and peaceful ambience as soon as visitors step inside. This is invaluable in a beautiful area such as Orange, which features a widely varying climate, from hot to icy cool, as do many inland centres of Australia,” says Fisher. “When visitors step across the threshold, they enter a serene, relaxing, and comfortable environment that is both welcoming and highly energy efficient, which is critical in these times of rapid energy price increases.”
Boon Edam architectural revolving door entrances – often combined with complementary security speed gates for crowd management – are used throughout Australasia for public facilities ranging from the Rialto retail and commercial centre in Melbourne to banks, telecommunications and data centres, and hospitality, health, educational and tourist facilities concerned about controlled access and sustainability.
