Design Excellence, Sustainable Business Practices, and the Integration of Technology

For more than 60 years, Steinberg Hart has been shaping environments and creating inspiring places through research, technology, and innovative design. Its 150 professionals bring a wide range of expertise to clients in various sectors, from higher education and housing to urban mixed-use, civic, and commercial interiors. Its employees thrive in a truly collaborative environment; through weekly design charrette sessions, they pinup their designs for others to review, leading to best practices cross sectors, an increase in creative thinking, and design excellence.

Steinberg Hart takes pride in understanding of how various design changes will affect the people who will ultimately experience the design daily. They talk with people throughout the process, gather feedback, and adjust as needed. This process takes time, but enables them to create environments that sculpt space and shape lives in subtle and empowering ways. 

“I am proud to work for a company that focuses on understanding design principles and encourages grand ideas,” said Gautam Shenoy, BIM Leader, Steinberg Hart. “We work on incredibly beautiful buildings, including the Thompson Hotel in Hollywood, California and Parkside Hall in San Jose, California.” Thompson Hotel will be in an 11-story building featuring three levels of subterranean mechanical parking, a restaurant, conference rooms, and a rooftop entertainment deck with indoor-outdoor dining, a pool, and a fitness center. Parkside Hall will be a mixed-use tower that combines residential, office, and hotel spaces, as well as an expansion for the San Jose Tech Museum of Innovation.

Leading Technologies Increase Efficiency and Accuracy

To enable its teams to focus on creating designs that exceed customers’ expectations, Steinberg Hart relies on the best technology solutions on the market. It uses Autodesk Revit Software for building information modeling, and it uses Ideate Software Revit add-in solutions to increase the power of Revit software.

“We use software tools to take building information modeling beyond understanding and massaging design concepts,” said Mr. Shenoy. “We use them to easily collaborate with clients, and because we ask our consultants to use the same products, we achieve a fully collaborative design environment and all changes are coordinated quickly and accurately.”

The two Ideate Software products that Steinberg Hart uses most often are Ideate Explorer and Ideate BIMLink.

“Ideate Explorer dramatically reduces the time we spend searching our Revit models for elements that need to be changed,” said Mr. Shenoy. “Without Ideate Explorer, teams hunt through Revit models for specific elements and manually select those for editing. With Ideate Explorer, we quickly search for 100,000+ elements, make selections based on filters or data sets, and easily edit them to align with design updates.”

Ideate BIMLink is Steinberg Hart’s go-to platform for managing schedules within its Revit models. “This powerful and progressive tool enables us to leverage the parametric database within our Revit models by moving the data into Microsoft Excel for easy review/editing, and then pushing the edited data back into the Revit model with speed and accuracy,” said Mr. Shenoy. “One of the many ways we use it is to calculate glazing vs. solid form, essentially allowing us to learn all about energy consumption and accurately determine the amount of material we will need.”

Attracting the Right People for Long-Term Success

Steinberg Hart is committed to maintaining an environment that attracts experienced, enthusiastic architects that push for change through design excellence, sustainable business practices, and the integration of technology. Ideate Software products help Steinberg Hart achieve this goal by eliminating time-consuming activities, freeing time for its employees to focus on creative and interesting activities. “The Ideate Software products serve as a perfect data map and platform that provide checks and balances needed in a world full of parameters and geometries,” said Mr. Shenoy. “They are based on truth – what you see is what you get. That truth factor is what keeps the process chaste.”