Advancing Capital Infrastructure Projects During A Period Of Uncertainty

To purchase access to the recording of the Advancing Capital Infrastructure online intensive, please go to https://vimeo.com/ondemand/rentinstituteintensives or email JLRogers@devosinstitute.net.

For nearly twenty years, the DeVos Institute of Arts Management has provided counsel for arts, culture, and humanities organizations at a variety of inflection points, including those considering capital developments, renovations, or expansions.

Leveraging this experience, the Institute is pleased to offer this online intensive for managers, developers, and trustees in the process of planning, or overseeing, a capital development, renovation, or expansion.



For organizations with a physical project underway – whether that be the development of new infrastructure, or the renovation or expansion of a current facility – the ground is shifting.

The DeVos Institute of Arts Management – a global leader in the planning, funding, and operating of new or expanded cultural institutions – offers this one-day intensive to address the most pressing considerations facing organizers of capital projects in today’s unprecedented environment:

  • What are the likely characteristics of a post-pandemic environment? What of this is relevant to the planning of physical site?
  • Should we proceed using pre-pandemic assumptions for attendance, programming, and operating revenues?
  • Does our pre-pandemic design work in a post-pandemic environment?
  • Does our timeline make sense? Does it remain feasible?
  • How will the pandemic affect our ability to raise the money needed for the investment?
  • How will a post-pandemic environment affect our ability to build the earned and contributed revenues required to support the investment on an annual basis?
  • Should we proceed, at all? Is the risk too great?
  • What, in any case, are best practices of which our project must be aware, pandemic or no?



This intensive will deliver practical strategy in the following key areas:

  • Estimating need, and demand, for new or expanded infrastructure, and the pandemic's impacts in that calculus
  • Building, or revising, a rational business plan to support the new or expanded operation
  • Maximizing Board leadership during the planning, fundraising, and development processes
  • Understanding, and managing, risk tied to a move, renovation, or expansion
  • Maximizing the relationship between design and business planning
  • Anticipating and avoiding common pitfalls and areas of underestimation


Including Guest Speakers:



Andy Hayles
Managing Partner, Charcoalblue

Andy Hayles is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Charcoalblue, one of the world’s leading integrated Theatre, Acoustics and Digital Consultancy services. The consultants of choice for many leading architects and theatre designers, Charcoalblue operates as a cohesive and collaborative team across six international studios in the UK, USA, and Australia, delivering projects to every corner of the globe. Charcoalblue has been honoured with the Queen’s Award for Enterprise in recognition for its excellence in International Trade 2020 and numerous awards from the Royal Institute of British Architects, American Institute of Architects, and the United States Institute for Theater Technology, among others.

Andy co-founded Charcoalblue following a number of leading technical roles at major theatres including three years as Chief Electrician/Lighting Designer at the Theatre Royal in Richmond and stints at the RSC and London’s West End. Andy’s U.S. consulting work includes American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, MA; The Yard at Chicago Shakespeare Theater; St. Ann’s Warehouse in New York City; and the forthcoming Perelman Center for the Performing Arts at the World Trade Center site. He has worked on UK venues at every scale from the modest Orange Tree Theatre to the National Theatre, the Royal Opera House, and the Roundhouse in London, as well as the Royal Shakespeare Theatre redevelopment in Stratford-Upon-Avon. Two new auditoria for Sydney Theatre Company on the pier under the harbour bridge are due to complete next month.

Andy has lectured at Cambridge, LIPA, and Canterbury Universities and has written extensively on the subject of performance space design for ABTT and ITEAC. He is the first (and only) theatre consultant to date to be featured in The Stage’s ‘Power 100’ and received the LIPA Companionship from Sir Paul McCartney in 2016 for exceptional performing arts design.

Andy is a recorded composer and artist with Music House/EMI Commercial Music Library; and a jazz pianist and trombonist whose enthusiasm is in somewhat greater a measure than his talent!

Joshua Dachs
Principal, Fisher Dachs Associates

Joshua Dachs is recognized as one of the world’s leading theatre consultants. Drawing on a background as a violinist, trained as an architect, and having practiced as a theatrical set and lighting designer, he has led FDA’s consulting practice for over 30 years, providing planning, programming, and design leadership for hundreds of successful projects. In early phases he focuses his work on helping clients conceptualize and plan their projects, and during the design phase focuses on room shaping, seating layouts and sightlines, backstage layouts, and overall spatial organization.

For Lincoln Center, he is currently planning the redevelopment of David Geffen Hall (formerly Avery Fisher Hall), and completed many other projects on the LC campus, including the renovation of Alice Tully Hall, expansion of the Juilliard School, and new screening rooms for the Film Society of Lincoln Center. He designed the acclaimed temporary stage installation for the

Mostly Mozart Festival in Avery Fisher Hall that has been used annually since 2005. He has worked with many of America’s leading drama companies on projects such as the Mead Center for American Theater for Arena Stage, San Diego Old Globe’s Conrad Prebys Theatre Center, and the Guthrie on the River in Minneapolis.

He is currently working on a 600-seat Opera House and teaching facility for the Shepherd School of Music on the Rice University campus in Houston, TX, and a new home for Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park.

He recently completed a new home for BLUEBARN Theatre, a small, artisanal, hand-made theatre company in downtown Omaha, NE; the Xiqu Centre for Chinese Opera in Hong Kong; and the renovation of the Helen Hayes Theater on Broadway for Second Stage in New York City, among others in the US and abroad.

He has helped plan and design four opera houses, including the Mariinsky II Opera House in St. Petersburg and Four Seasons Centre Opera House in Toronto; worked with major orchestras including the NY Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, and designed the newest Broadway theatre, the Stephen Sondheim on W43rd Street. He has worked with the Park Avenue Armory since its inception as an arts venue to make careful modifications to that extraordinary historic building to accommodate enormous international opera, music, dance, and theatre events, and has designed or collaborated on nearly all the performances that have been presented there.

A graduate of the High School of Music and Art in New York who originally studied the violin, he holds a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Cornell University. Josh has led a team of experts teaching a professional development course on theatre design at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He has been a guest critic at SCI-Arc and the UCLA School of Architecture.

He is currently on the Board of Directors of Theatre Communications Group, and the International Society for the Performing Arts (ISPA), and a member of the American Society of Theatre Consultants (ASTC). Josh’s wife, Ako, is a stage and film actress.

Catalytic Fundraising Add-On


For organizations contemplating capital fundraising in support of an infrastructure project, the Institute will offer a separate, one-day special intensive on November 23 discussing Catalytic Fundraising Campaigns in the Pandemic Era.

CLICK HERE to learn more.

The Catalytic Fundraising Online Intensive on November 23rd has sold out and the waiting list is now available. Please email Jen Rogers at JLRogers@devosinstitute.net to join the waitlist.

Registration Information

Date and Time:
Friday, November 20, 2020 11am-3pm Eastern Standard Time

Location:
Online. Instructions will be provided upon registration.

Registration fee:
$179 per organization, for up to three participants.

Registration limited to 100 organizations/projects.

Register online by November 13.

CLICK HERE to learn more about the Institute.


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