Steven Holl Architects (SHA) is an international, award-winning architecture and urban design conpany working as one office from two locations; New York City and Beijing. SHA has designed museums, galleries and exhibitions, universities and educational facilities, and residences. They have also designed commercial space for retail, offices and public utilities.

Steven Holl Architects creates and designs innovative, unusual and award winning buildings. From residences in Paradise Valley, Arizona, to Long Island, New York, museum complexes world wide, a marina in Beirut, Lebanon, and university buildings from Prague, Czech Republic to Princeton, New Jersey — if you see an unusual angular structure, a beautiful building with attitude — chances are high that it's an SHA design.

With extensive experience in the arts, SHA's work was recognized by Time Magazine in December 2007 in the 10 best Architectural Marvels.

The Nelson–Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City, Missouri) was awarded first place, and the Linked Hybrid (Beijing, China) was voted as the third most promising project internationally for 2008.

Data storage is not easy when it comes to architecture. Not only are there drawings, images, pictures, plans but then there are contacts, articles, publications, invoices and more to neatly collect, store and make findable in an organized yet intuitive way. Moreover, SHA had one overriding concern. The firm wanted its database to look and feel like the work they do — it had to be aesthetically austere and functional, while being elegant and simple all at the same time.

Business Challenge

The challenge for David Van der Leer, the publications and exhibitions manager at SHA, and Julio Plasencia, the database designer at The Support Group, was several-fold. It meant starting from scratch as SHA's previous storage method was unstructured and not digital, and it meant learning how architects and designers work, so as to make accessing the stored data as simple and natural as possible. It also meant dealing with files that are unusually large — as plans and construction documents tend to be. And yet all the facets of the highly complex jobs that SHA undertakes had to be as retrievable as a rolled up drawing from a collection of tubes in the corner of an office.