Denver, US
Replacing four sets of escalators in a century-old facility that sees over a million visitors a year is no easy task. Yet, KONE managed to do this at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, with no disruption to the flow of visitors.
The Denver Museum of Nature and Science was established in 1900 and is housed in a 66,528-square-meter building. The museum contains over a million objects in its collection, and over 1.6 million people visit it every year in order to be amazed and fascinated. However, every building, especially the popular ones, have to modernize periodically to keep up with the changing times. And the Denver Museum of Nature and Science was no exception, especially when it came to its escalators. The life of a well-maintained escalator is usually about 25 to 30 years old, and the ones at the museum were about 28 years. KONE had won the contract to upgrade the escalators with KONE’s EcoMod – a complete modernization solution that allows for escalators to be upgraded without any need to demolish floors or building facades. Additionally, they also gave the museum the ability to reverse direction, a feature that was lacking in their existing escalators. This gave the museum operators much-needed flexibility to switch locations and manage people flow better, during the numerous exhibits and events that take place there every year. The KONE EcoMod escalators at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science were completed three weeks ahead of schedule. During the period in which the escalators were being modernized, the museum registered a record-breaking 1.8 million visitors. Yet the level of disruption was minimal.
