[nfbwatlk] Article About Blind Architect

[Mike Sivill]

He's only been blind for one year and he's mentoring blind teens? 
And designing buildings for blind people?
Interesting.
Mike

-----Original Message-----
From: nfbwatlk-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nfbwatlk-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of Alco Canfield
Sent: Monday, May 04, 2009 12:25 PM
To: nfbwatlk at nfbnet.org
Subject: [nfbwatlk] Article About Blind Architect

Sudden sight loss drives architect to aid blind
Sam Whiting, Chronicle Staff Writer
This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

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.

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 1/2-8our 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."

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