Kings Waterfront - Arena and Convention Centre Liverpool

Kings Waterfront is the single largest development site in Liverpool City Centre.  At a total cost of £160million the building was a partnership of Liverpool Vision, English Partnerships, Northwest Regional Development Agency and Liverpool City Council.

The Arena and Convention Centre or ACC Liverpool combines what is known today as the BT Convention Centre (which houses a 1,350 seat auditorium, 18 break out rooms and 7000 m² of exhibition space) and the 11,000-capacity Echo Arena. Both of these are interlinked by a central galleria which joins the two venues.

The unique building design inspired by a ‘Motorola flip-top mobile phone’ has created a visitor destination of international quality combining arena, conference and exhibition facilities. Used as a centrepiece for Capital of Culture celebrations in 2008 - residential, hotel, office, retail, leisure, community and open space were developed in the surrounding area.

At the heart of the building's function is the separation provided between the two halves or "central hinge in mobile phone terms" by the Clark Door fire and acoustic doors.  Clark Door supplied five bespoke, specialist doors, with total value of £500,000 as follows:

Loading Bay Door

Clark Door was asked to supply a folding power operated Acoustic Door 8m wide x 4.8m high to achieve an acoustic rating of Rw30dB.

This loading bay door was required to provide a good match to the external appearance of the building, to provide free access to the loading bay when in the open position and when power closed achieve the necessary acoustic performance to stop unwanted noise entering the building.

The Clark design team rose to the challenge building a test rig in the company’s factory to test the door’s operator mechanism which had to be capable of handling the pivoting sliding 10 leaves and at the same time handle the mass in the acoustic panels.

The  photographs show the door on the clients site, with the Clark Door custom designed header drive mechanism, floor track and hinged panel system.

Telescopic Sliding Door

Clark Door’s Acoustic Sliding doors have an established reputation in the industry for combining high attenuation with fire integrity.  The telescopic horizontal sliding door was 6.0m wide by 4.7m high and achieved a designed acoustic rating of Rw 42dB with 60minute fire rating.

The photo shows the Clark Door Header Track incorporating a Telescopic sliding feature. The header design had to ensure the architect’s clear opening height objective was achieved with a very limited headroom available.  The novel door track system was fully tested in Clark Door’s UK based manufacturing facility prior to installation on-site.

The telescopic multi-leaf design meant that the door needed only 50% of the side room of a conventional power operated sliding door.