[nfbwatlk] Article About Blind Architect

[Jedi]

Dan and All:

I have a feeling that most of the archetects won't be so discerning. 
after all, many of them wouldn't know how to lead their lives if they 
were blind. Many of the sighted people I meet judge my abilities based 
on what they would do if they were blinded the moment they met me. 
naturally, their ideas are frightening and gloomy. Luckily , I am able 
to help them understand their misconceptions and provide them with 
correct and helpful information. If our archetect friend doesn't have 
that information, then I would honestly say that our sighted archetects 
will definitely have any lowered expectations reinforced.

As to Youth slam, there's a part of me that's also worried about who 
our mentors are. In 2007, I sat with a young man and a mentor. Both of 
these men had quite a bit of residual vision. The young man was asking 
his mentor about how he ought to navigate the world with his low vision 
and whether or not he should carry a cane. His mentor said that, if his 
vision were good enough (and I expect "good enough" means somewhere on 
the more visual end of the blindness spectrum), then he need not use a 
cane unless he wants to. In this mentor's view, a cane is only 
necessary for a legally blind person to identify oneself as visually 
impaired and perhaps to explain unusual behaviors such as getting close 
to objects or people, standing in the wrong place, touching things, etc.

at the same time, I see Youth Slam as a wonderful opportunity to mentor 
this archetect. Someone at the National center (and I can't remember 
who) told me that the art of planning a convention or an event should 
include influencial people in the blindness field who can learn from 
us. I was told that the best way to draw these people in is to have 
them share their work with us in a meaningful way. There is no doubt 
that spending time with 200 blind high school students, 100 members of 
the NFB, and extra staff will be an incredible opportunity for this 
guy. It wouldn't surprise me a great deal if he receives our message 
since it appears he's attempting to be proactive about his blindness. 
It sounds to me like the basic buildin blocks of a positive attitude 
are there, they just need to be kindled with positive philosophy and 
reinforcement.

Dan, please let us know if our archetect friend will be joining us in 
Maryland. I would be curious to know.

Respectfully,
Jedi
Original message:
> List Colleagues:

> This article is troublesome on a number of counts. I have passed along
> my concerns and reservations about the person featured in this article
> to those hear who may ultimately have contact with him.

> I have inquired if the week-long summer event in Maryland referenced in
> this article is in fact the Youth Slam; this query has not yet been
> answered. I am confident, however, that if he is planning to mentor in
> the Youth Slam, that event organizers will take this information on
> board to work with him before he has first-hand exposure to
> impressionable blind youth. A mentor training is part of the preparation
> for the Youth Slam. Challenges exist when you try to assemble several
> hundred mentors from across the country with uniformly high
> expectations; efforts have to me made to mold this group as you do with
> most communities.

> Certainly I agree with the prevailing sentiment that nothing about a
> building's design, save accessible signage and access technology, should
> be different to accommodate blind people, but it would be interesting to
> hear what he thinks--after one year of blindness--would make a
> difference for our community. I fear that his proposals will include
> design features that suggest fairly low expectations of blind people.
> The notion that he feels as he does suggests to me concerns about his
> blindness philosophy and adjustment. Finally, it is disturbing that he's
> been given such a public forum among architects to espouse his views.
> Twenty thousand architects have now received the message from a blind
> person in their profession that special accommodations are needed and
> ought to be considered for blind people; unfortunately few of them will
> be discerning enough to recognize that he's been blind for a short time,
> that his expectations and beliefs are colored by this fact, and that one
> person does not represent the overall viewpoint of the blind community.

> Be well.

> Dan Frye

> -----Original Message-----
> From: nfbwatlk-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nfbwatlk-bounces at nfbnet.org]
> On Behalf Of Alco Canfield
> Sent: Monday, May 04, 2009 3:25 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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