RocHenge Events / Coors Field, Denver

It helps that some of his company’s biggest suppliers – MAPEI, Dal-Tile Corp. and Polycor Inc. – partnered with RocHenge in the project, and they’ll be a big part of those future presentations.
RocHenge is primarily a slab fabricator. Cottrell says the floor mosaic was probably a first for most of the RocHenge team, although he’d worked on them for previous employers.

Working from CAD drawings with numbered pieces, as many as 35 tile installers from Brekhus Tile and Stone worked around the clock to get the job done in time for opening day.

Early on, the company decided not to go with a stylized representation of the mountains , out of respect to the color palette developed by Rowland + Broughton.
“The suites have an almost residential feel to them,” Cottrell explains. “A lot of the color tones are warm and soft, and we didn’t want a bright, popping floor to depict all the mountains. We wanted a homogeneous surface.”
Also a concern: the time available to obtain materials, cut them, and get them installed. While a big boost for the Rockies and their fans, the team’s presence in last fall’s World Series distinctly shortened a construction window governed also by this spring’s opening day.
“It was really a question of whether we were going to have enough time to complete the project or whether we were going to have to wait until this coming winter,” says the ball club’s Falvey. “But, when we identified that RocHenge was going to be the naming-rights partner, as well as a subcontractor on the project, things really started falling into place.
“They were just as invested in the project as we were, and brought a tremendous amount of resources to bear in the form of materials and labor in a very condensed timeframe.”

Each 18” X 18” segment of cut tile was carefully assembled at RocHenge, then transported to the jobsite in specially constructed grid boards.

However, Cottrell says the delay starting the project limited RocHenge’s access to materials. As a result, the two primary stones for the mountains became Galaxy Black granite from Dal-Tile and Nordic Black granite from Polycor.
“The only variations in the shading come in the way we had the tiles finished,” Cottrell explains. “Obviously, for coefficient-of-friction, you don’t have the ability to use a huge area of polished stone. The surfaces were honed, thermal-finished or sandblasted.
“We also used color-enhancers on some of the areas so we wouldn’t introduce a polished finish. There’s a little bit of polish on the floor, but it’s in minute and limited areas.”
Once the finish options were provided, the process went back to Martin and his team at Rowland + Broughton, who created the actual artwork that became the mosaic.
Martin admits it was a first for that company, too.
“Through the gift of the Internet, we were able to search for photographs of the six peaks we used,” he explains. “We did a composite of them together in one long mountain landscape, traced over them and tried to create a color-by-number approach with the stone species and finishes we had available.”
Cottrell calls it “seeing where they could get the most bang for the buck,” while Martin says his team might have been more fluid had more time and other stones been available.
“We weren’t worried so much about the materials per se, but what materials we could get in time,” Martin says. “We had to make certain decisions based on economy and timing, and we didn’t want to compromise things for either the Rockies or RocHenge.”