NCAA Tournament: Rose Brand Gets to the Final Four Along With Chicago Flyhouse

A black masking curtain project of enormous scale.

Rose Brand partnered with Chicago Flyhouse on a massive project to control the lighting in the 2019 NCAA Final Four tournament at US Bank Stadium in Minneapolis. The windowed perimeter of the venue caused natural sunlight to change lighting conditions on the basketball courts, depending on time of day and weather conditions. But the NCAA required the light to be consistent for all tournament games. What to do?

The stadium owner, Minnesota Sports Facility Authority, resolved the problem by engaging Chicago Flyhouse, one of the leading stadium & arena rigging companies in the country. Rose Brand and Chicago Flyhouse often work together on projects that combine rigging and curtains on a very large scale.

The unique design solution had to cover all the stadium windows, as well as permit easy installation & removal to meet the varying lighting requirements of different events. The design called for over 132,000 square feet of curtains (over 15,000 lbs of fabric) to be fitted and sewn for window coverage. Some of the curtains were as much as 160 feet tall!

Rose Brand manufactured the curtains from Pewter Encore® fabric with a black lining. The fabrics were specifically chosen to achieve the following functional and aesthetic goals:

• Control the lighting issue on the courts

• Provide sound dampening to improve acoustics

• Promote fire safe ty given the fabric’s inherent flame retardancy

• Achieve perfect color consistency throughout the stadium, despite the more than one hundred thousand sq. ft. of fabric required

In addition to making it to the Final Four, Rose Brand and Chicago Flyhouse are guaranteed to make it to the championship game as well, since the game will also be played at US Bank Stadium.