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British Turntable Creates Impact at Imperial War Museum North
Three manually operated turntables designed and manufactured by British Turntable Co. are contributing to the drama of Imperial War Museum North by creating an unorthodox and highly unusual entrance from the main foyer into the Museum shop.
The application demonstrates how two rooms or areas with quite separate personalities can be totally and discreetly self-contained yet can quite easily be transformed into a single room with an individuality of its own. The large, purpose-built turntables, each of which has a carrying capacity of 2000kg, are used to create a moveable shop window. Mounted with a 4.4m x 0.65m rectangular frame, they support the whole of the shop frontage, which has been built in three sections and incorporates integral visual merchandising units that can be viewed from both inside and outside the shop. The turntables allow the whole frontage to be swivelled round, safely creating jagged angles and providing four distinctive and highly dramatic entrance-ways into the shop from the main foyer of the museum.
British Turntable has worked closely with Soren Bisgard from the Museum's highly-acclaimed architects, Studio Daniel Libeskind, and with Quinns Shopfitting, who manufactured the merchandising systems, to create the right ambience for the area. Although the concept of moveable walls was a fairly simple one, Soren Bisgard was initially sceptical about whether they could be made to work in practice. "To use a full platform revolve for each piece of the wall would have been impractical, and the effect would not have been right." he says. "We had every confidence in British Turntable's expertise and ability to come up with the right answer, and are delighted with their scheme to hide the mechanisms and use a frame support for the display walls. This allowed the floor to present a smooth seamless surface and the walls to break up the symmetry when they're opened up and parked at irregular angles."
British Turntable drew on the company's considerable engineering expertise to design, build and demonstrate a prototype, which, after minimal refinement, became the model for the final units. The architects' main concerns were that the display units should be completely stable," says British Turntable's technical director, David Houghton. "It was also important that they could be moved relatively easily and locked into position to provide a totally safe environment for the visiting public to enjoy. We were able to fulfil this requirement, and Soren Bisgard, of Studio Daniel Libeskind, has told us they are absolutely delighted with the result. As part of the project we also fitted the revolve mechanisms with damper units to ensure their stability when moved."
British Turntable expects this type of application to be ideal for hotel, exhibition and conference centres, universities and colleges, art galleries and heritage venues and any public building that requires flexible accommodation for exhibitions, displays and meetings of all kinds. The company has been solving engineering problems using movement for more than 40 years and is accredited to ISO 9001.
Further information on special custom built movement can be obtained from David Houghton at British Turntable Co. Ltd, tel: +44 (0)1204 525626, fax: +44 (0)1204 382407, e-mail: info@turntable.co.uk.