Situated slightly apart from Reykjavík's traditional center, the building has become a significant visual icon in the city thanks to its stunning design. Harpa′s location means that, to a great extent, the changing climatic and light effects experienced in this most beautiful of Northern cities will be amplified and exposed in the multi faceted exterior of the building, dramatically contrasting the shadow often experienced in the older narrow streets in the rest of the city.
Harpa Concert Hall and Conference Center is part of an extensive harbor development project in Reykjavik, the East Harbour Project. Designed by Danish architectural firm Henning Larsen Architects and Icelandic architectural firm Batteriid Architects, the building's design is based on a geometric principle reminiscent of the crystallized basalt columns commonly found in Iceland.
As the name indicates, the overall objective of the project is to expand and revitalise Reykjavík's eastern harbor with a new downtown plaza, a shopping street, a hotel, residential buildings, educational institutions, and mixed industry. The building is the ideal venue for various concerts and musical events, international conferences, conventions with accompanying trade shows, as well as meetings.
Situated slightly apart from Reykjavík's traditional center, the building has become a significant visual icon in the city thanks to its stunning design. Harpa′s location means that, to a great extent, the changing climatic and light effects experienced in this most beautiful of Northern cities will be amplified and exposed in the multi faceted exterior of the building, dramatically contrasting the shadow often experienced in the older narrow streets in the rest of the city.
With regards to internal door security, specifying the correct access control solution was a vitally important consideration from the outset for the buildings designers. Keen to ensure their cutting edge design incorporated the very latest security innovations they wanted to avoid use of inflexible master key systems. Instead they wanted simplicity, affordability and a fully scalable solution that allowed instant upgrades at any time.
"The GEO system sets the benchmark for access security across many applications and after listening to what the architects and designers wanted to achieve it was the ideal choice for Harpa Concert Hall and Conference Center," comments Jesper Buch, Business Development Manager Nordic Countries at Salto Systems. "Working in consultation with Henning Larsen and Batteriio architects we designed a highly secure and flexible access control system to meet all of the needs of the building owners. The advanced GEO design understands the building's needs, its technology, how it needs to work and how flexible it needs to be. It's is a powerful wire-free access control technology that's easy to install in any kind of door,” Buch continues.
It currently controls over 100 doors in the building with more doors continually being added to the system. The operating technology of the cylinders is DESfire EV1 and to ensure access is never compromised Salto's patented Data-On-Card SVN system is also incorporated as standard. This allows the stand-alone GEO cylinders and locks to upload, store and download the latest access information as people use their DESfire EV1 RFID cards throughout the building. The cancelled key list can be updated, key cards can be cancelled and audit trail reports can be downloaded at will, all of which delivers additional security and operating benefits compared to standard locking systems.
"With their ability to customize both the access system hardware and software to our requirements, the Salto GEO solution has the flexibility we need," comments Helga Thors, Marketing Manager at Harpa Concert Hall and Conference Center. “It enables us to control the security of the entire building, including authorizing or denying access privileges to individual rooms all from one control point and most importantly it can grow to meet our ongoing future security needs as required.”