Kings Waterfront

Liverpool - UK

Kings Waterfront is the single largest development site in Liverpool City Centre. A partnership of Liverpool Vision, English Partnerships, Northwest Regional Development Agency and Liverpool City Council is jointly promoting its development.

A unique building design ‘borrowed’ directly from a Motorola flip top mobile phone, the aim is to create a visitor destination of international quality combining arena, conference and exhibition facilities. It formed a centrepiece for the Capital of Culture celebrations in 2008, alongside a development of residential, hotel, office, retail, leisure, community and open space uses.

Clark Door have provided both fire and acoustic separation primarily in the atrium or in mobile phone terms “the centre hinge”. This project had a value of £500,000 for the specialist doors produced.

Among the five bespoke specialist doors supplied, 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.

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 60 minute fire rating.

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

The header design had to ensure the architect’s clear opening height objective was achieved with a very limited head room available. The novel door track system was fully tested in Clark Door’s UK based manufacturing facility prior to installation on-site.