The Christman Company

The Christman Company has been building since 1894 and is headquartered in Lansing, Michigan, with offices in Detroit, Knoxville, Greensboro, Raleigh and the Washington, D.C. metro. The employee-owned firm works across construction management, general contracting and design-build, with more than 500 employees and a long record in higher education, healthcare, government and historic restoration. Christman is general contractor on Wayne State University’s $200 million Health Sciences Research Building in Midtown Detroit, a five-story, 160,000-square-foot biomedical facility designed by HKS that reached structural steel in April 2026. The company also self-performs concrete and carpentry, which is unusual among CM firms of its size and useful on constrained urban sites.

Eight regional offices carry the Christman name today: Lansing and Detroit and Grand Rapids in Michigan, the DC Metro office in Washington, Greensboro and Raleigh in North Carolina, Knoxville in Tennessee, and Dallas-Fort Worth in Texas. The company was recently named among the leading general contractors in the Washington, DC region, and ENR placed it at No. 68 among top US contractors on $2.176 billion in revenue.

Self-perform is a separate business, not a side capability

Four companies handle work in the field under the Christman umbrella: Christman Constructors, Christman Mid-Atlantic Constructors, Christman Southeast Constructors and Christman Facility Solutions. Trade coverage spans carpentry, millwork, demolition, concrete, mass timber, earthwork and interiors. For an owner, self-perform capacity usually shows up as schedule control on the scopes that sit on the critical path.

Services that start before the shovel

Beyond construction management, general contracting and design-build, the client services group offers project planning, development services and bond services. Bond services in particular is aimed at public owners running millage or referendum campaigns, where the construction estimate and the funding ask have to line up long before design.

Historic preservation as a discipline

Christman treats preservation as a standing practice rather than an occasional job type. Its Don’t Pocket the Past program governs how historic fabric is protected and documented on site, and the firm publishes guidance on adaptive reuse, tax credits and the unforeseen conditions that reliably surface once a century-old wall is opened. That work earned Christman and partner Brinker the AGC Build America Award, the association’s top honor, for the Michigan Central Station rehabilitation in Detroit.

Where technology is actually being used

On the Michigan DTMB Public Health and Environmental Science Lab, the team applied augmented and virtual reality, robotics and digital twins to coordination — and delivered a geothermal and ice-storage energy system the company describes as first of its kind. Robotic dogs are used for after-hours site capture so data collection does not interrupt production work.

Market sectors and community work

Sixteen market sectors are listed, including data centers, healthcare, higher education, K-12, industrial and power, multi-unit residential, parking, public and government, religious and cultural, science and technology, sports and recreation, and transportation. Alongside the project work, the Be Constructive program supported more than 300 organizations in 2025, documented in an annual community impact report.