Protecting An Architectural Masterpiece

Oct 1, 2003 12:00 PM

In his 13 years as director of security for the Denver Art Museum, Tony Fortunato has seen dramatic changes in the facility's security system. “When I came here in 1988,” he recalls, “we had a security system that was considered the standard for museums at that time and was only a few years old.” Unfortunately, the museum did not keep up with advancing technology and recently needed to upgrade its system.

A regional cultural resource with a collection of more than 40,000 works of art, the museum attracts exhibitions from museums around the world. To protect these works of art, the museum has established stringent security and environmental standards, and a security upgrade was needed to meet them.

The museum's 210,000-square-foot building was opened in 1971. Over the next several years, the museum will undergo a major expansion project that will add a new 146,000-square-foot wing, designed by German architect Daniel Libeskind, who is also designing the new World Trade Center site in New York City. But even before the official completion date for this new wing was announced, a multi-faceted program of retrofitting existing systems started in the main museum and a nearby administration building. The new system will integrate alarm monitoring, access control, and environmental system controls for all museum buildings and will enable a higher level of control, resulting in greater efficiency of security management and reduced costs.

Finding an effective security system proved a challenge, and the first try was problematic. “The system was not capable of handling the number of alarms that we needed to monitor, and before the installation was even complete, we heard grumblings from the local reps and from the factory,” Fortunato says. “We knew something was wrong, and eventually, we had to start all over again.”

Andover Controls and Westover Corp., a Denver-based Andover representative, were chosen to play significant roles in providing the necessary systems. Flexibility of the Andover system made it suitable to the museum's needs.

“We were able to design it to meet all our specific needs. I never realized that your typical security system is designed more to meet your access control needs than to monitor hundreds of alarm points and process large numbers of incoming alarms. In our world, it is just the opposite,” Fortunato says.

This time around, determined not to have the same problems, the museum partnered with the City of Denver and hired a professional consultant who specialized in computer security systems. He and two senior security managers from the museum conducted a year-long evaluation of major systems on the market.

“The Andover system doesn't freeze up when it receives a large number of alarm transactions,” Fortunato says.

The environmental controls issues facing the museum also proved difficult. The museum requires a “flat line” for temperature and humidity around the clock, a far more stringent requirement than an average commercial building. The original HVAC control system installed in 1971 was not adequate to meet the varying environmental requirements of these special exhibitions, so the building of the new wing was an ideal opportunity for an upgrade. When it is completed, an Andover system will control the museum's security, access control, and HVAC systems with a CyberStation front end.

Due to the museum's special exhibition schedule, the changeover of the current control system and the new equipment installation were coordinated to ensure that the stringent temperature and humidity requirements of the artwork were maintained.

The new wing of the museum is scheduled to open in summer 2006. When completed, the security, access and HVAC control systems for the complex will be integrated. Along with receiving alarms from security devices, the security staff will receive alarms if temperature or humidity should vary from established parameters. They will also receive pro-active alarms on equipment failure, enabling management to dispatch maintenance personnel to correct the problem before it affects the artwork environment. Logging, trending, and graphing will be automated and stored, which will allow the museum to verify to lending institutions that their art was displayed under a properly controlled environment.

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For the Record

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