Hufcor’s Premier™ aluminum bi-fold door is helping to turn oversized door openings into design opportunities. Evidence of this can be found at the Boston Children’s Museum where a pair of Premier doors were created to blend with the exterior design of a 23,000 sq. ft. addition.

“Every door is engineered and built specifically for the application—no door is off the shelf,” said Mark Blanchard, vice president of sales and marketing for Hufcor. “Accommodations are made for the selected covering and, in the case of exterior applications, the door is engineered to meet specific wind load requirements.”

Cambridge Seven Associates (C7A) of Cambridge, MA designed the addition. The firm’s Steve Imrich said the doors created for the project “were designed to coordinate with the richly patterned glass and zinc façade, while offering a dynamic operational capability to the Museum’s programs.”

Premier doors take up almost no side room and very little headroom. In addition they need no tracks in the floor and come equipped with simple, automatic push-button controls.

The Premier’s architectural aluminum tubing construction provides superior strength, yet is surprisingly lightweight. While the framework can be clad, painted or anodized, most applications have begun with mill finish frames for the field completion of the design.

In addition to the Boston Children’s Museum, the Premier door has been used on such high-profile projects as Dow Diamond baseball park in Midland, MI; the Daniel Guggenheim Aeronautical Building at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge; the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, MN; and the Carnegie Museum of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA.