Denver Art Museum, Denver

For all its steel and titanium, the designers didn’t totally ignore more-traditional building materials … such as stone. With some 36,000 ft² of granite flooring inside – not including 800 lineal feet of tread and risers for the interior’s impressive staircases – and another 20,000 ft² in a different color outside, natural stone has its own distinct presence.
However, it might’ve been a different story with this budget-challenged project had it not been for the perseverance of consultant and masonry contractor Pat Ryan. Thanks to plenty of hard work and good contacts half-a-world away, Ryan was able to find and install stones that worked for the designers and the accountants.

SIMPLE ELEGANCE
There’s no easy way to describe the Hamilton building , which opened to the public last October. A collection of geometric, titanium-clad angles, its 146,000 ft² features a 120’ high atrium/entrance with sloping walls ,and a staircase that follows those walls.
A second two-story atrium is located in the 19,000 ft² bi-level modern and contemporary galleries. The building also features a sharply cantilevered section that juts across 13th Avenue, a major Denver street, toward the museum’s main building, erected in 1971. An enclosed glass and steel bridge links the two structures and provides access to an indoor/outdoor event space.
The structure, designed by a partnership between Studio Daniel Libeskind of New York and the locally-based Davis Partnership Architects, provides more space for the museum’s permanent collection, as well as temporary exhibition galleries and additional public space.
With such an eye-catching design, it’s easy to believe the flooring might have been overlooked, but both Maria Cole, an architect with Davis Partnership, and Kristin Altman, a communications associate with the museum, say that aesthetics played an important role in the building’s interior as well.
“Design was pretty critical in the implementation of our expansion, and we were particularly conscious of the flooring,” says Altman. “All our galleries have Douglas fir floors, and all the non-gallery spaces have black granite. It’s a subtle difference that helps ease the transition from the public spaces to the galleries.”
Architect Daniel Libeskind’s color palette in the structure is, “pretty simple,” says Cole. “The power of his architecture is to keep things simple and clean and the stone works very well with that.”
Cole echoes Altman in calling the Black Pearl granite floors, “an elegant solution,” and she agrees that it has a nice relationship with the wood floors in the galleries.
The granite also met one other concern, the two women say; the desire for a low-maintenance material.
“Ease of cleaning was definitely a consideration,” says Altman. “Our facilities managers worked with the general contractor to determine what the best cleaning mechanisms would be.”

CRITICAL ISSUES
As the project began to move forward, there was only one problem with the granite specified by Libeskind: cost.
The $110 million project’s treasury included a mix of capital campaign, bond initiative and endowment funds; as work began to move forward, Cole says the stone originally specified by Libeskind had a similar look but was simply too expensive.
Enter Pat Ryan, the now-retired president of Parker, Colo.-based Ryan & Company Inc. Ryan explains that he was initially brought into the project by Minneapolis-based general contractor, M.A. Mortenson Co., as a consultant to see if the architect’s desire for granite could be made to fit with the budget.
“We do a lot of work for Mortenson, and I also do a lot of consulting on projects in Colorado,” says Ryan. “People rely on our reputation, our track record and knowledge of the industry. We’ve done most of the biggest granite jobs in Denver for years.”
Still, Ryan faced a major challenge. Although donations eventually reached a point where the project could afford to expand the finishes for several interior items, he was assigned to try to find a product that would work be installed for less than $25 ft².
Although he admits he wasn’t happy with the idea, Ryan says he immediately though of buying stone from China. He had first turned to that country for another project five years ago and went through a steep learning curve that eventually required him to change fabricators in the middle of the job – but also left him with a reliable business partner.
“The Chinese will tell you anything you want to hear, so you have to be real careful,” he says. “It takes a lot of time in China, making sure the product is what you want and inspecting it in the ports before you ship it, because you’re out-of-pocket 100-percent once you receive the bill-of-lading. There’s an element of risk there.”
Ryan brought several different black granites in for consideration, but the design team ultimately settled on Black Pearl, which he describes as mottled.
“It goes from dark gray to black with a thermal finish,” says Ryan. “It’s a nice black material, but it’s not as consistent in color as some blacks. It has a little color variation they liked, and after looking at price points on several materials, Black Pearl seemed to be the one that worked within the budget and timeframe for delivery.”
While cost was critical, the timeframe for delivering the product was also crucial.
“Once I was under contract to purchase the material, I had 120 days to land it and have manpower on the jobsite,” he says. “Luckily, I had done a lot of footwork in finding materials, locating quarries, and understanding the weather conditions where the material was being quarried.”
Nor was the Black Pearl for the interior the only material Ryan needed to find. He had also been asked to locate a red granite for the exterior plaza, and a blue-gray granite for the exterior benches.
“The exterior is another product I found almost in Mongolia,” he says. “I had it quarried and fabricated in China and brought it in. I’ve named it Dragon Red. It’s a 3” material set in sand. The pavers are all 4” X 12”, and we used about 20,000 ft² of it.”
The bench material is strictly known by a color number, but it proved to be what the designers were looking for.
“With that, it was a question of finding a fabricator,” says Ryan. “The benches are roughly 2’ wide, 30” high, and range in length from 4’-9’. The architects wanted them to resemble a rough block, where the drill marks and blast marks are still visible around the perimeter. I needed to find someone who was also willing to do a mock-up, because it was all about looks. I found a company in China willing to do it and had the granite blocks shipped to them.”
 
DEMANDING SCHEDULE
Finding the right stones for the project was only part of Ryan’s involvement on the job, however. His company ended up installing both the interior and the exterior stone, which presented its own distinct set of challenges.
Melanie Morehart, Mortenson’s project manager for the Denver Art Museum, says in choosing Ryan as the masonry sub, quality was a huge concern.
“When you first walk into the museum, you definitely notice the floors and notice the finishes,” she says. “From a construction standpoint, we also wanted a company that would have the resources available to man-up the job when we needed them to. Often, at the end of the job, you are forced to work some overtime – and usually it’s the flooring subcontractor who takes the brunt of that.”
That became an even bigger concern when the company bid to install the exterior granite pavers as the masonry work inside reached a peak.
“We asked if that was going to be a problem and if Ryan was sure he wanted to bid it,” says Morehart. “They did both jobs and they did a great job. They completed both areas on time.”
Not that it was easy, says Ryan, even though the job ran typically with 18-20 people on-site.
“The schedule was very demanding,” he says. “The project ran behind schedule and unfortunately, the finish guys are always stuck trying to catch-up with time beyond our control. We were out there installing stone for six months.”
The complex geometrics of the structure, while visually interesting, made installing the flooring an extra challenge, especially in the main atrium. Unlike most jobs on which he’s worked, Ryan says it was impossible to do a precise set of shop drawings and bring in most of the stone prefabricated.
“Because of all the angles, we worked with repetitive modules,” he explains. “We had six different sizes and then worked off whatever wall they wanted us to lay out on. There are also a lot of stairwells with weird angles.
“Because we didn’t feel comfortable dialing in a perimeter dimension in our shop drawings, we made the decision to have the stones shipped long and then cut in the field.”
Ryan says cutting in the field isn’t that unusual. When an architect or contractor isn’t willing to sign off on a dimension his company will often do that, but typically it amounts to no more than 40 percent of a job.
For the Denver Art Museum, 100 percent of the flooring was field-cut.
Fortunately, he says just about everyone on his crew was capable of cutting stone on-site. The company also has an in-house fabrication shop. And, in any job requiring field cutting, Ryan says it’s his practice to bring in an extra five percent to seven percent of material to offset the waste.

TRUE CRAFTSMEN
To complicate things still further, much of the interior flooring work was going on around other trades that were also hurrying to complete their parts of the project.
“The project was running so far behind, and with the 120-day duration we had to install the granite, we started having to install the floors, and then have them protected,” says Ryan. “We had guys putting in the ceilings and finishing the HVAC after the floors were in.”
Although it’s difficult, Ryan includes in his contracts that – to get a job done by a given day – the contractor will release given amounts of area where the masonry sub can keep a specified number of tile setters at work.
“Once we started running out of time, it left us no other choice, and the general contractor concurred with it,” says Ryan. “We’d had to do this on many fast-track jobs that don’t have the luxury of waiting for items such as the lights to be in.”
To ensure the best installation possible, Ryan utilized a combination of LATICRETE International Inc. products, including its Blue 92 Anti-Fracture Membrane, 9235 Waterproofing Membrane and 253 Gold Multipurpose Thin-Set Mortar.
“I like LATICRETE,” says Ryan. “We’ve used them a lot in the past; they have a good distributor in Denver in the Rio Grande Co., and we like their products and support.”
The exterior pavers were sand-set, and Ryan says that part of the job was fairly straightforward – except that it overlapped with the interior work and the company had only 90 days to complete that portion of the job.
“Again, it had a lot of perimeter cuts, and there were a lot of different paving patterns,” he says. “Once donations started rolling in, there was a real push to make sure the pavilion area between a condominium complex going in next to it and the museum was quite a work of art. However, the biggest problem was getting the material out of China and to the jobsite.”
Now that the Hamilton building is open and drawing rave reviews, both the contractor and the architect say they’re quite pleased with the project and Ryan & Company’s performance.
“They did a great job for us,” says Mortenson’s Morehart. “We really didn’t have any problems with them.”
Davis Partnership’s Cole says Ryan personally did a tremendous job getting the architects samples and finding stones and suppliers that would work within the project’s budget, and that excellence carried over to the whole Ryan team.
“Ryan & Company did the highest quality work and are true craftsmen in what they do,” says Cole. “This project was really based on true collaboration between the design team and the construction team, and Ryan really epitomized that. It was a pleasure working with them.”

This article first appeared in the September 2007 print edition of Stone Business. ©2007 Western Business Media Inc.