[nfbwatlk] Article About Blind Architect

[KAYE KIPP]

I wonder what he's doing to make his design specifically for the blind, and 
why?

Kaye
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Alco Canfield" <amcanfield at comcast.net>
To: <nfbwatlk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Monday, May 04, 2009 11:24 AM
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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