I just finished up a session at the DHI Connextions conference, along with my coworkers, Mark Kuhn, Christin Kinman, Randy Jump, and Grant Miller, and I could not believe how many brass/bronze doors we saw in Chicago!  The city’s architecture is fantastic and it’s just a beautiful city in general.

The most famous of these doors are probably the peacock doors at the Palmer House Hilton.  The doors were designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany of Tiffany & Co. in 1873.  Amazing!

One thing I noticed EVERYWHERE on the streets of Chicago were the efforts made toward accessibility.  Most of the doors serving office buildings, hotels, theaters, and even retail stores have automatic operators.  We saw these doors on the way to dinner – the pairs have two-foot leaves (Randy for scale), but auto operators were added to open both leaves simultaneously.

The bottom rails of most of the doors have been modified to provide a flush, smooth surface of at least 10 inches measured up from the floor, but this is not required by the accessibility standards for automatic doors – only manual doors.  This Starbucks entrance had the modified bottom rail along with an auto operator (many doors have been modified this way).

I love the push bars on these revolving doors:

And this one!

And look at this amazing ceiling!

This church has some of the most ornate doors we saw:

Another beautiful entrance (with narrow doors):

We saw TONS of Von Duprin 55 devices – they’re perfect for these doors!

There are remnants of the original entries everywhere…even at Panda Express!

And look at the entrance to Target!

These are balanced doors, which use a different type of hanging mechanism:

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I’m not a fan of the modification made to these plates in order to add pulls.

These are not original but a good reproduction in aluminum doors:

And I really like this look – the black with brass:

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