City of Glasgow College: revolving doors at the main entrance, automatic doors beside them for accessibility and escape.

Reference project — not a Eurowindow project. This article summarises public information from the sources listed at the end, with our own commentary. Images belong to their owners and are embedded directly from Pinterest with a link back to the source.

The project at a glance

• Name: City of Glasgow College, Glasgow, Scotland
• Capacity: 40,000 students and 1,300 staff
• Project cost: £228 million, per the supplier case study
• Main contractor: Sir Robert McAlpine
• Entrances: west and south wings with steel-and-glass facades, each with manual revolving doors
• Adjacent doors: automatic swing doors driven by GEZE Slimdrive EMD-F electro-mechanical operators

Reference clip: automatic sliding door in a shopping centre

A clip showing how a “cavity” automatic sliding door, which slides into the wall, works in a shopping centre, to help you picture how this family of doors moves.

What stands out on the facade

According to GEZE, the main entrances are designed to match the campus’s steel-and-glass facades. Each entrance has revolving doors, with automatic swing doors beside them driven by electro-mechanical operators.

These automatic swing doors give people with limited mobility barrier-free access and, in a fire, serve as barrier-free emergency exits.

Note: figures and descriptions above come from the sources cited at the end; we quote them for reference and have not verified them independently.

Our take

What is worth learning here is how the roles of the doors are divided:

1. Revolving doors look good and hold conditioned air, but they cannot replace a door for everyone. Wheelchairs, prams and luggage all need an automatic door alongside.
2. An entrance must plan for escape too. Automatic doors in busy places must open on power failure or on a fire-alarm signal.
3. Choose the door type by traffic, not by looks. An entrance serving tens of thousands of people a day is a different problem from a small office lobby. See Eurowindow automatic doors.

If you are weighing options for a high-rise project, send your brief to the Eurowindow technical team to discuss specifics.

Sources

• GEZE — Revolving doors for the City of Glasgow College
• Pinterest — pin Revolving Doors for City of Glasgow College
• Pinterest — pin: Automated cavity slider in shopping mall (CS Doors)

This article is for reference only and does not imply Eurowindow took part in this project. If you own an image or content and would like it changed or removed, please contact sonhn@eurowindow.biz; we will act immediately.