CASE STUDY: BAYLOR UNIVERSITY BUSINESS SCHOOL HEADQUARTERS, WACO, TEXAS

A key challenge of the recent Paul L. Foster business and innovation campus project at Baylor University was that the building needed to reflect through design the university’s commitment to educating leaders for the 21^st century and still meet stringent codes to ensure safety and ease of movement. Horizontal sliding fire doors were the answer, providing critical protection and egress in the case of fire or emergency as well as meeting the latest stringent code requirements—all the while maintaining the design integrity of the sleek new building.

The innovative and creative project included 26 doors total in the building, most of which were used to keep the stairs open. The door assemblies, in fact, allow for the use of stairs and provide an open connection between all four floors of the new 275,000-square-foot campus housing Baylor’s Hankamer School of Business (finished in July of 2015).

Adam Bush, an architect with Overland Partners (the design and prime architecture firm with the project), elaborates, noting the specialized horizontal fire doors allow for efficient, open connection and circulation around the central atrium, which is an essential design feature of the project.

The atrium, which functions like a town center, connects multiple programming components, such as faculty offices, classrooms, conference spaces, and meeting rooms, along with department suites with faculty offices. The open space allows for the free flow of students—and ideas. Likewise, an auditorium and conference center connected to the atrium provide both a resource for campus development as well as a critical touch point between students, lecturers, potential recruiters, and alumni.

The fire doors remain in shallow storage pockets during normal business hours and allow for that obstruction-free flow without disruption throughout the building.

The Foster building creates a modern environment of community as it respects and honors Baylor’s heritage, values, and traditions. Overland Partners’ vision for the project was a modern, light-filled, innovative building core composed of glass and wood wrapped in an exterior featuring red brick and a stone base, which is reflective of the traditional historical campus architecture. The unobtrusive accordion-style fire doors played perfectly into that vision.

Photo courtesy Won-Door Corporation

Horizontal sliding fire door assemblies allow for the use of stairs and provide an open connection throughout the new 275,000-square-foot campus housing Baylor University’s Hankamer School of Business.

CASE STUDY: ACCESS SOLUTION AT BICYCLE HOTEL, BELL GARDENS, CALIFORNIA

The seven-story Bicycle Hotel and Casino with 117,907 square feet of space, completed in the fall of 2015, is one of the world’s largest casinos, located near downtown Los Angeles. With the addition of a 99-room, five-star luxury hotel to the Bicycle Casino, the architect needed a way to ensure throngs of visitors could freely move from the casino floor to the hotel area in a way that needed to be open and, in the event of a fire or similar emergency, could quickly be closed off.

Accordion fire doors provided the answer to this access challenge.

Wade Kao, the project architect for Lee & Sakahara Architecture of Irvine, California, says the expectation is that in an emergency situation there will be between 800 and 900 people coming through the north-end area that connects the hotel with the casino. He explains, “The door needed to be a bi-parting door. We couldn’t deal with a single-part door. And we needed a 3-hour separation.”

To meet this need, it installed a 36-foot-by-11-foot 6-inch fire door between the old and new areas. The project illustrates the flexibility of design when utilizing specialized accordion folding fire doors in large occupant load facilities, while not disturbing the day-to-day operations of an assembly area. There are also 6-foot 6-inch by 8-foot fire doors in each of the five hotel tower elevator lobbies.

Kao says it didn’t want a hold-open door in the lobbies so the accordion fire doors were the ideal solution.

CASE STUDY: MAJOR RETAIL VENUE

Providing egress in retail venues can be a challenge, particularly in high-volume turnover stores where stock is stored on the perimeter. At a major retailer, stockroom size is minimized so that the majority of floor space can be devoted to the retail sales floor. Shipments arrive daily and are staged around the perimeter. This configuration presents problems if customers and employees need to leave the building quickly in a fire emergency. Building codes state that the number of exits, travel distance between exits, and exit spacing must be based on the square footage and occupancy loads of the building. To meet these requirements, it was necessary that the doors leading from the retail sales space to the stockroom be used as a means of egress—requiring passage through different types of occupancies. In addition, these exiting corridors needed to be separated from their adjoining areas, often requiring a large span-rated fire barrier. Traditional fire doors would have limited the size of opening, required multiple sets of doors, and increased maintenance costs.

Instead, sliding fire door systems could be used to separate existing corridors from the stockroom. They had the advantage, when open, of allowing unobstructed access to all areas of the loading docks, stockroom, and retail space. They also met code requirements for use as a means of egress without occupant load limitations.

Specifying sliding door systems can be accomplished at a price comparable to or less than traditional swinging fire door assemblies.

Photo courtesy Won-Door Corporation

In an emergency, sliding doors create corridors from retail spaces through the stockrooms so that shoppers and employees can safely exit.