Why Boon Edam's frameless revolving door stops at three meters

A Boon Edam presenter is driving over the tops, as he says the road from Leeds to Manchester is known locally, with a colleague in the passenger seat and a Crystal Tourniket at the end of the trip. Ahead of them is a square in central Manchester with two of the frameless revolving doors, one of them mid-service by another Boon Edam colleague. The presenter calls the outing a crystal safari.

The point he wants to land in this Entry Masterclass segment, recorded for MarketScale Studio, is a single number. Boon Edam caps the Crystal Tourniket at three meters because its glass ceiling hangs from nothing. For an architect selling a client on an all-glass lobby, that is the trade: maximum transparency, a fixed ceiling on size, and a second door on the drawing.

The timing matters because the safety standard the door is built to has just changed. The Automatic Door Suppliers Association, or ADSA, said on 30 January 2024 that CEN had published EN 16005:2023 with additional safeguarding and test requirements for revolving doors, and that national standards bodies had until 30 June 2024 to withdraw the 2012 edition. Any Crystal Tourniket specified since then is judged against the new text.

The glass is the frame, so glass sets the span

The presenter places the Crystal Tourniket as Boon Edam's second standard-capacity revolving door, a sibling of the framed Tourniket. The difference is profiles, the metal sections that frame each glass panel and carry its load on a conventional door. The Crystal has none, so the glass itself provides the structural strength, which is why it reads as far more transparent than the framed door beside it.

The throat opening is the gap in the curved drum wall where people step in and out, and the canopy, the roof of the door, spans it with nothing hanging it from above. The speaker says the throat is wider on a four-wing door than on a three-wing door, so the ceiling glass crosses a longer unsupported span and sags first. The dent he describes is glass that has deflected under its own weight and stayed deflected.

Deflection governs glass size in other door types too. In an April 2017 Glass Magazine piece, Derek Forney wrote that once an interior glass swing door reaches nine feet tall it needs thicker glass or a door pull to limit deflection, and that as height and thickness rise, supporting the added weight becomes vital. Forney also noted that the Glass Association of North America's size limits reflect the hardware on the market rather than what glass can do, and can be exceeded with proper support.

That is the complication for Boon Edam's cap: add support and the span can grow. The answer in the presenter's account is that the Crystal Tourniket sells on having no support to add, because a frame over the throat would put profiles back on a door whose purpose is their absence. Canopy height is flexible up to three meters as well, so a three-by-three-meter door is the largest Boon Edam builds.

Two rings and a drum wider than glass allows

The presenter flags the consequence as an important side note for any Crystal Tourniket, and it is the one a specifier will be asked about first. Boon Edam says in the video that a wheelchair-accessible revolving door needs two rings and a drum wider than any Crystal Tourniket.

Neither ADSA's public summary of the 2023 revision nor the abstract of EN 16005 in the iTeh Standards catalog of CEN standards names a clause that fixes a two-ring diameter for wheelchair use, so the figure rests on the speaker's word as a rule of revolving-door design. The abstract does place doorsets used for normal access and for emergency and escape routes inside the standard's scope. That is where a drum too narrow for a chair matters most, because the escape route has to work for everyone in the building.

That squares with guidance accessibility bodies have given for years. The United Nations' Accessibility for the Disabled design manual, kept online by the UN Programme on Disability, states that revolving doors are not suitable for disabled people or people with prams, and that an adjacent accessible swinging or sliding door should be provided wherever a revolving door exists. The same manual sets the minimum clear opening of an exterior door at 0.90 meters.

Set those figures side by side and the scale of the gap is plain. The companion door the UN manual asks for needs less than a meter of clear opening, while a revolving door that admits a wheelchair needs a drum wider than any Crystal Tourniket by the speaker's count. For a lobby, that is the difference between adding a door leaf and adding a second entrance structure.

What EN 16005:2023 changed before the June 2024 deadline

EN 16005 is the European standard for power-operated pedestrian doorsets. Its abstract, as published in the iTeh Standards catalog of CEN standards, describes requirements for design and test methods for doorsets driven electro-mechanically, electro-hydraulically, electro-magnetically or pneumatically, and covers safety in use for normal access, for emergency and escape routes, and for fire-resistance or smoke-control doorsets. The presenter says every Boon Edam revolving door, the Crystal included, is built to it.

Those four items are the visible end of compliance. Safety buffers are the soft edges on the wing and drum that cushion a contact; contrasting stickers mark the glass so a person sees it before walking into it; EBS is Boon Edam's name for the presence sensors that register a person near the moving wing. The emergency stop sits on a post inside the door.

The 2023 edition rewrote the risk assessment for vulnerable traffic. ADSA's 30 January 2024 note also lists new safety dimension drawings showing typical hazard prevention, detailed construction requirements for barriers set at 90 degrees and in the same plane, and additional safeguarding and a test specific to revolving doors. ADSA says the standard had been under review since 2018, and that during that time many CEN member countries asked for clarification of the 2012 text, and the list it publishes covers safety and test methods rather than accessible-entry dimensions.

The legal weight of the new edition was still settling when ADSA wrote. It said EN 16005:2023 had not yet been harmonised or cited in the Official Journal of the European Union, and explained that once a standard is harmonised and designated, a presumption of conformity applies, meaning a door built to it is taken to meet the health and safety requirements behind it. Until that citation lands, a specifier is working to the current text on ADSA's instruction rather than on a legal presumption.

For a facility manager the practical line is retrospectivity. ADSA states the standard is not retrospective, so a door fitted before the UK publication date need not be brought up to the 2023 edition, while anyone specifying, supplying, installing or servicing powered pedestrian doors should work to the new text once published. A Crystal Tourniket on a new drawing is a 2023-edition door; one already in service is not obliged to change.

In the US the test is clear width, not drum size

Since the 2021 International Building Code, some accessible public entrances in the US must have automatic doors. Lori Greene wrote in a July 2025 Decoded column for Door Security + Safety Magazine, published on iDigHardware, that the requirement depends on the building's use group and occupant load, and that the 2024 edition of the IBC carried it forward.

Greene explains that ICC A117.1, the accessible and usable buildings standard, and the ADA Standards for Accessible Design keep automatic doors in a separate section from manual doors. Automatic doors must give at least 32 inches of clear width with all leaves open, in both power-on and power-off modes, and full-powered doors must comply with ANSI/BHMA A156.10, the standard for power-operated pedestrian doors. They are not held to the maneuvering clearances of manual doors, the floor space a wheelchair user needs to open a door by hand, unless they sit on an accessible means of egress without standby power.

None of that measures a revolving door's drum. The US route Greene describes asks whether the accessible public entrance has an automatic door with 32 inches clear, which a swing or slide beside a Crystal Tourniket can provide. The European rule the presenter describes differs in kind, because it carries a diameter at which a revolving door itself can qualify, so a specifier working across both regimes is answering two different questions.

ISO 21542:2021, the international standard for accessibility and usability of the built environment, covers approach and entry, circulation, egress and evacuation, and lists doorsets and windows among the building components it addresses, according to ANSI's description of the standard. ANSI describes its scope at the level of parking, circulation, components and evacuation, so a specifier working to ISO 21542 should read its doorset clauses directly rather than assume the European figure carries over.

The drive goes in the floor and the panel stays within cable reach

The Crystal Tourniket's drive goes in the floor because its glass ceiling cannot carry a motor. The presenter says the door can be fully manual, but anything beyond that, from a collapsible wing system to a powered or fully automatic drive, needs a home that is not the roof.

In most cases the drive sits in the floor slab. Where the structural slab is too thin to house it, Boon Edam can mount the drive under the floor, in a parking garage below the entrance. The question for the design team is slab depth at the door position, and it belongs to the structural engineer as much as the architect.

Controls follow the same logic of keeping weight off the glass. An inside post carries the emergency stop button and can also take the touch control panel; the panel can instead sit at reception, or in both places. The presenter adds a limit on how far that reception panel can be, a maximum cable run between door and desk that he says is important to keep in mind.

Motion detectors, the sensors that wake the door as someone approaches, are supplied loose with it. A customer can have them on a roof trim in the throat opening, extend that trim for the full 180 degrees, or keep them off the door entirely, inside in or under a suspended ceiling and on the street side in floor pods set into the ground.

Where the frameless door fits, and what sits beside it

The UN manual's answer to the accessibility gap is the adjacent swinging or sliding door, and it adds that power-operated doors are the best option for people with disabilities, that sliding doors are generally preferable to swinging ones, and that automatic doors suit heavy traffic. A lobby built around a Crystal Tourniket is a two-door lobby. The companion door is the one that carries the 0.90-meter opening and, in the US, the 32-inch clear width.

Whether rival frameless revolving doors stop at the same span is an open question for a buyer comparing bids, because no public figure puts a diameter cap on them. What the buyer can hold a bid to is ADSA's instruction that every firm specifying, supplying, installing or servicing powered pedestrian doors works to EN 16005:2023, and the UN manual's requirement of an accessible swinging or sliding door beside every revolving one. The next check is on the drawing itself: slab depth at the door position for the floor-mounted drive, and the cable run from the door to the reception desk.