[Nfbc-info] Blind Oakland Archetect

[Bryan Bashin]

Folks,

I thought many of you might be interested to learn about the progress 
of Chris Downey, a new blind guy, and a student of LisaMaria 
martinez, among others.  Chris will be mentoring at this summer's NFB 
Youth Slam.

Bryan




Sudden sight loss drives architect to aid blind
Sam Whiting, Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, May 2, 2009

Fifteen months ago Chris Downey was just another green architect, 
based in Oakland.
Now he has an expertise that separates him from every other architect 
in the Bay
Area and all 20,000 attendees at this week's American Institute of 
Architects' National
Convention in San Francisco.
Images
Architect Chris Downey reads drawings that have raised fi...
Downey walks through his office with the aid of his cane.
  View Larger Images
Downey, 46, is a blind architect dedicated to planning buildings for 
blind people,
a niche brought about by his sudden loss of sight after surgery.
"It is actually pretty exciting," says Downey, as he sits in a 
drafting room, like
everybody else at SmithGroup Inc. in the Financial District. Then he 
rises to 6 feet
4, grabs a white cane with one hand and reaches out with the other, 
grasping for
something to shake. "For someone who likes problem solving, this is 
quite a challenge,"
says Downey, who has been working up floor plans in braille to submit 
to blind clients
overseeing the design of a new blind rehab center at the Veterans 
Affairs center
in Palo Alto.
"It's a question of how do you design an environment for people that 
aren't going
to see it?" Right. But there is one question before that. As he puts 
it, "Blind architect.
What a preposterous idea. How does that work?"
The answer starts with a benign tumor that had slowly encircled the 
intersection
of optic nerves. The tumor began to push the nerves out of position, 
and that's when
Downey couldn't follow the flight of a baseball as he played catch 
with his son,
Renzo, now 11, at home in Piedmont. Next Downey was hitting stuff in 
the road, during
the 100 miles he'd do weekly on his bicycle. Still, he could get his 
work done with
the aid of glasses. His eyeballs looked fine, but an MRI revealed a 
non-malignant
golf-ball-size growth causing the blind spots.
"If it weren't for playing baseball with my son and riding my bike, 
who knows when
I would have figured it out," he says.
Because of the tumor's proximity to the optic nerve, radiation 
treatment to shrink
it was not an option. He had surgery on St. Patrick's Day 2008 to try 
to correct
his vision, even though he was aware that it was risky and might not work.
Downey's father, a physician, had died of complications from brain 
surgery at 36,
so waking up after the procedure at all made Downey feel "pretty darn 
lucky." Luckier
still that he had blurry vision, as expected. "It was amazing," he 
recalls. "It was
a 9 1/2-hour procedure, and the next day I was up walking around."
When he awoke on the second day, his field of vision had been cut in 
half horizontally,
as if the water were at eye level in a swimming pool. By the third 
day he'd lost
vision in the top half, too. It varied from dark to light for five 
days, then it
faded to black.
"I lost my sight," says Downey, who knew going in that this was a 
risk. "But I came
out pretty darn healthy, with the exception of the sight."
He accepted blindness right away. What he could not accept was the 
advice of a social
worker who came in and immediately started discussing a career 
change. Every step
he had taken since junior high in Raleigh, N.C., had been toward 
becoming an architect.
He had seven years of schooling into it, topped by a master's degree 
from UC Berkeley
in 1992. Since then, he had designed aquariums, libraries, theaters, 
stores and homes.
He tried returning to the job he'd started a few months before he 
became ill, but
was laid off before Christmas. He searched the Internet, and found 
one blind architect
in Lisbon, Portugal, and a guy who works as a forensic architect, 
investigating failures
in buildings. That was it.
On a whim he called Patrick Bell, a business adviser to architecture 
firms, and that's
when Downey finally got some decent Irish luck. As it happened, Bell 
was working
with a firm called the Design Partnership, which is doing a joint 
venture with SmithGroup
to design a 170,000-square-foot Polytrauma and Blind Rehabilitation 
Center for the
Veterans Administration Palo Alto Health Care System. Bell made the 
connection, and
Downey was hired as a contract architect.
"It's the first time any of us have dealt with even a sight-impaired 
architect, let
alone one who is blind," says Kerri Childress, VA spokeswoman. "It's 
really been
beneficial having an architect who is blind working on a facility to 
serve the blind."
The design phase runs through July. From there, Downey has been 
invited to serve
as a mentor to blind high school students at a weeklong event this 
summer in Maryland.
(He's also back to cycling on a tandem bike with his buddy steering, 
and is up to
60 miles in the Oakland hills.) And he wouldn't mind addressing next 
year's AIA convention
in Miami.
"I was always nervous in front of crowds," says Downey, "but now that 
I can't see
them, I think it will make it easier."
E-mail Sam Whiting at
swhiting at sfchronicle.com
.
This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle