Chris Plevin

Chris provides team leadership, design consultancy and project management services.

I am a Team Leader at Charcoalblue. I have the privilege of enabling our collaborators both internal and external to galvanize their unique talents, artistic sophistication , and technical acumen towards manifesting incredible spaces. Within Charcoalblue I focus on amplifying the skills of our extraordinary team of designers and creators in realizing work that is both efficient and inspired. I strive to facilitate connection and realize opportunity in the interdisciplinary cross-pollination of ideas. With our clients, I strive to view their projects as a peer, with an appreciation that we can only understand our projects goals with an understanding of the journey that has inspired them. Both in the process and in the realized product of our buildings, it’s important to me that we have helped our clients to better understand not just their facilities and their operations, but how we can work to create space that is a physical manifestation of their institutional identities. From blue sky dreaming, to the most granular conversations about constraints, I find joy in the partnership and in counseling our clients in creating the most inclusive and invigorating artistic platforms we can–unique to them, and reflective of their journey.

What Excites You Most About Your Work

I love working with our clients to unlock goals that they may not have realized when embarking on the process with us. The A-Ha moments which occur a rehearsal room, a theatrical design meeting, or a season planning effort can be equally manifested in a facility design process when a fertile environment is created for these sorts of discoveries. I love unlocking potential through honest partnership and focused collaboration.

What Brought You to Charcoalblue

I spent over 20 years working in the theater production industry in Chicago. I had the privilege of leading the production department of an extraordinary organization with boundless artistic ambition and an appetite for pushing the boundaries of our physical space. In my time there, we hired Charcoalblue to design a new and wildly ambitious building. I spent 6 years on the client side of the table–working with Charcoalblue to define a brief and ultimately to realize this new artistic platform. I discovered in this process the incredible challenges associated with these sorts of projects, and how much I enjoyed the problem solving therein. Several years later I decided to make the move to CB, and have been happily entrenched in these challenges ever since!

What Clients/Colleagues Value About You

I think our clients view me as someone who works from within. Consultancy as a field is not without its negative connotations, often viewing consultants as hired guns who assess from afar and approach problem solving exclusively through a lens of templates and efficiency. I prioritize building relationships on holistic engagement and on understanding our clients not just through the lenses of metrics but through an appreciation of community and process–sometimes inefficient but almost always effective.

What We Won’t Learn from Your CV

I am a recreational mycologist. I cultivate and grow gourmet mushrooms in the basement of our house in a carefully designed and climate controlled tent. I collect coffee grounds from coffee shops in my community and use them as a substrate to grow these miraculous and highly nutritional treats! Mushrooms can teach us so much about sustainability in our efforts to design and realize environmentally conscious structures. They are a high quality product that is quite literally created from garbage!

A Place That Shaped or Inspires You

Water in all of its forms. I spend almost as many hours under the water as I did on dry land growing up, training as a rescue diver and spending the summers working as a whitewater guide on the rivers of California. I love design inspired by water–finding fluidity in rigidity and pulling the non-linear nature of water into designs that traditionally default to linear form. Also, my mother’s house, where I spent so many hours discussing her love of the arts and cultivated my own.

Coffee, Travel, or Creative Ritual

Exercise is my meditation. I have run 6 marathons and the training journey has never failed to ground me in other aspects of my life. My AHA moments often occur while pounding the pavement!

What Are You Learning About Right Now

Vans! I am 1 year into building out a cargo van into a retreat on wheels. When complete it will allow us to travel (a passion!) without needing to leave our two large dogs at home. We look forward to seeing more of our vast country while minimizing our air travel and keeping our canine band together while we do!

Cultural Value You Most Identify With

Collaboration is what brings us to the Theater. The experience of making art with like-minded people is what I suspect led most of us to this industry, and is what I most enjoy about creating spaces. Charcoalblue’s internal and external communities are more than the sum of our parts, and I deeply enjoy the synergistic successes we can find when the right people are in the room and focused on a common mission.