Steven Burns

Steven Burns received his Master of Architecture degree from Harvard University and has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Syracuse University.

In 1993, after seven years as an Associate and Senior Designer with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, working in Chicago, London and Berlin, Burns opened his own firm, Burns + Beyerl Architects (BBA).

Four years later, he started working on a software solution for streamlining his own business. He turned this solution into a product, ArchiOffice, which became a commercial success.

Steven Burns then took his management expertise to BQE Software, where he currently enhances their business strategy and product development as Chief Creative Officer.

In an alternative career as an architect/software developer, Steven Burns, FAIA has effected profound change in the way thousands of architectural firms manage their office and projects. He took his proven architectural skills of efficiently solving design problems and applied them to software development; creating ArchiOffice®, a unique application used by every employee within an architectural firm from principal to intern to simplify management, streamline tasks, share information and most importantly, reduce risk.

In 1993, after seven years as an Associate and Senior Designer with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, working in Chicago, London and Berlin, Burns opened his own firm, Burns + Beyerl Architects (BBA). Four years later, his small five person firm, though profitable was suffering from the same ailment which afflicts many small and medium sized firms: being as undisciplined in their own management as they were disciplined in creating beautiful designs for their clients. Burns felt that only an architect, intimately familiar with the process and business of an architectural firm, could create an elegant, aesthetic workflow and management system. So began his three year journey learning software programming and building ArchiOffice, software that integrates contact and document management, time and expense tracking, project workflow including checklists, milestones; submittal, RFI and drawing tracking; calendaring, scheduling, budgeting and invoicing into a single, easy to use and understand application. The goal was to provide Burns with more time to do what he loved most: designing architecture.

The impact of the software upon BBA was so significant that Burns created Orange Loft, LLC to turn ArchiOffice, into commercial quality software and provide for its continual improvement. He knew that as other architects used the software, they would have valuable ideas that could lead to its enhancement. The essence of ArchiOffice is to take a community of small and mid-sized architectural firms, provide them with a means and incentive to share management ideas, manifest them in the software and return them back to the community.