Standing at 87 storeys high, the architecturally distinctive Shard building with its crystalline facade houses a mixture of high end office spaces, restaurants, apartments, a five-star hotel and a public viewing platform. The challenge for Nortech and Gunnebo was to secure the entrance with a system that had a modern and elegant design to complement the building while being 100% effective at preventing unauthorised access.

Gunnebo was able to provide a combination of slimmed-down high speed gates and half-height turnstiles controlled with Nortech’s MRC350, a motorised card capture reader that is designed for use at entrances and exits. Compatible with Gunnebo access control systems and turnstiles, the MRC350 units enable high speed flow of staff and visitors.

The sleek and stylish nature of Gunnebo’s Speedstile FL range was a great fit with the synergy and beauty of the Shard building. This was a key deciding factor on the Speedstile FL products being chosen for this project.

Simon Preston, Marketing Manager at Gunnebo UK commented, “The integration allowed us to provide the Shard with a stylish, efficient and secure access control solution, which eliminated bottlenecks whilst maintaining the flow of visitors and staff. We are very pleased with the result.”

The Nortech MRC350 is designed to be cost-saving because of the infrequent need to replace unreturned cards. It avoids the need for dedicated visitor turnstiles or gates and the intelligent 'Capture or Return' mechanism enables the same reader to be used for both staff and visitors. The MRC350 can be used to read any ISO proximity or smart cards, using integrated third party readers so that bottlenecks at entry and exit points are avoided.

As a front-end device, the Nortech MRC350 card capture reader can replace any standard proximity or smart card reader and provide the added capability of capturing cards under instruction from an access control unit. It can be integrated into roadside pedestals, turnstiles or any appropriate housing as an OEM card reader for access control applications. The card data is read by an attached reader and passed onto an access control unit. The access control unit then makes a decision based on this data and signals back to the card capture unit to either capture or return the card, and to indicate whether or not the card has been accepted. The MRC350 card capture reader can use third party readers to support any card format, making it ideal for integration into existing systems.