The Shalleck Collaborative

The Shalleck Collaborative plans and designs theaters, classrooms and meeting spaces, along with the production and audiovisual systems inside them. It’s based at 1553 Martin Luther King Jr. Way in Berkeley, California, and lists a second location in Portland. Clients fall into three groups on its site: arts and entertainment venues, schools and universities, and corporate, civic or nonprofit meeting spaces. The firm doesn’t state a founding year or headcount. On the Castro Theatre Restoration in San Francisco, it served as theatre consultant. Its project page says the work covered reconfigurable seating, integrated AV and accessibility upgrades, the pieces that let the old movie palace run as both a cinema and a concert hall.

Where the firm enters a project

The services page is the most useful thing on this firm’s site, because it sets out a practice that begins well before anyone draws a room. Facility planning and design is listed first, and it is scoped as concept and feasibility work: needs assessments, conceptual design and feasibility studies, then programming and planning covering room criteria, adjacencies and site evaluation for new or renovated facilities. Layout and flow follows — audience, performer and operational circulation, seating configurations and sight lines. Then technical coordination, which means setting the structural, mechanical and electrical criteria that production and AV systems will need. Project support closes it out with design reviews, documentation coordination and construction observation.

The audiovisual practice runs alongside that rather than after it, covering the conceptualisation, design and coordination of AV systems for performance venues, classrooms, corporate facilities and civic spaces, including immersive soundscapes. The firm’s stated aim is to integrate sound, image and connection into the architecture so that performance and communication feel effortless — which in practice means the AV requirements shape the building rather than getting fitted into it later.

The team, and what that implies about scale

The about page names its people, and that answers the headcount question the firm does not answer directly. Sixteen individuals are listed: a president and principal, four further principals, four senior consultants, five consultants, a business manager and an executive assistant. That places the practice in the 11 to 50 band.

The credentials attached to those names are specific to this corner of the industry and worth reading as a signal of what the firm is set up to do. Adam Shalleck, the president and principal, is FAIA. Ian Hunter, the AV lead, holds CTS-D. Jedd de Lucia and Maura LaRiviere are ASTC. Scott Krenzke and Graham Howatt hold CTS, with Howatt also serving as BIM manager. Jill Collins holds CDT, and Erik Carter is AIA. The firm’s own line is that it understands how these spaces work because its people have worked in them.

Two locations are listed, Berkeley and Portland, with the mailing address at 1553 Martin Luther King Jr. Way in Berkeley and the phone a San Francisco 415 number. The firm states more than two decades of practice but publishes no founding year, so none is recorded here. LinkedIn is its only linked social profile.