If he can't see, how can he be an architect?

My Seeing Eye dog Whitney thinks city life is pretty fantastic, too. (Photo courtesy WBEZ.)

I subscribe to TED Talks. I can’t see their videos, and I rarely click on them, but reading the descriptions of their featured talk each morning gives me an inkling of what “the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers” are thinking and doing these days.

Yesterday’s update linked to a talk by an architect who has lost his sight. The promo material said Chris Downey’s 12-minute talk “shows how the thoughtful designs that enhance his life now might actually make everyone’s life better, sighted or not.”

Um. Well. Yes. I had to link to this one, doncha think? I wasn’t all that interested in hearing his design ideas, really. What I was dying to know was what the heck an architect who loses his sight can do for work.

Chris Downey’s talk is called City Designed with the Blind in Mind. I found some of it a little trite (he calls his ideas outsights rather than insights, and he likes to think people who don’t have disabilities “just haven’t found them yet”), but I must admit I did find myself nodding in total agreement when he declared “cities are fantastic places for the blind.”

I lost my sight in 1985. Since then, Mike and I have lived in a college town (Urbana), a Chicago suburb (Geneva), an ocean town (Nags Head, N.C.), and a big city (Chicago). We have loved each place for different reasons, and for me, our ten years in Chicago have rewarded me with fantastic opportunities and an unequaled sense of independence.

Downey had been a working architect in San Francisco for years before 2008, when surgery to treat a brain tumor left him blind at the age of 45. He said he was so familiar with the city that within six months he was back at work and using a white cane to commute to the office on his own. He never does explain how he works as an architect without being able to see anymore, but I did find an interview at The Architect’s Newspaper where he explains how he uses wax tools called wikki stix to sketch embossed plans. Maybe they show that in the TED Talk? Well, anyway, in that same Architect’s Newspaper interview, Downey described one of the first projects he worked on after losing his sight: a Polytrauma and Blind Rehabilitation Center for the Department of Veterans Affairs in Palo Alto. “The client and the team were becoming aware that they really didn’t understand how space and architecture would be experienced and managed by users who would not see the building,” he said. “When I showed up as a newly blinded architect with 20 years of experience, there seemed an opportunity to bridge that gap.” The fact that he was a rookie at being blind was a bonus, he said. “I was not that far removed from the experience of the veterans who were dealing with their new vision loss.”

Four short years later, Downey has his own business consulting on design for people who are blind and visually impaired. In addition to the VA project in Pal Alto, he has worked on renovations of housing for people who are blind in New York City and consulted on the new Transbay Transit Center in San Francisco. He teaches accessibility and universal design at UC Berkeley and serves on the Board of Directors for the Lighthouse for the Blind in San Francisco.

Spoiler alert! Spoiler alert! If you plan on listening to Chris Downey’s TED Talk, stop reading this blog post now. I’m about to give the punchline. At the end, he says urban planners who think of people who are blind as prototypical city dwellers will come up with design elements that make life better for everyone, whether sighted or not:

• a rich walkable array of predictable sidewalks
• no cars
• many options and choices at the street level
• a robust, accessible, well-connected transit system

I don’t know about you, but that all sure sounds, ahem, good to me!