Chris Downey worked as an architect in San Francisco. While coaching one of his son's baseball games, he noticed he had trouble following the ball. After numerous visits to his doctor, he was told that he had a slow growing tumor on his optic nerve. After a grueling 9.5hr surgery, he had burred vision, and by the fifth day of recovery he had lost his sight altogether.
He returned to work after his surgery but experienced major difficulties as he could no longer use the design software or read the plans. All of this took place during the worst dip in the economy, so like the rest of the businesses architecture firms took a financial hit. He was let go from the company.
Yet this didn't stop him from pursuing another job. He contacted other blind businessmen to see how they managed, eventually finding another blind architect in Portugal. He was the one who told Downey, "A blind architect is specially sensitive to tactile, acoustic and smelling details of the Architecture. . . The important thing is not stop working."
So he didn't. He found a blind computer scientist who discovered a way to print floor plans into brail. He has since been hired by another design firm and was a significant part in building a school for the blind. I think his unique take on design was said best by one of his coworkers:
“He can’t just look at a drawing at a glance. At first I thought, Okay, this is going to be a limitation. But then I realized that the way he reads his drawings is not dissimilar to the way we experience space. He’ll be walking through a plan with his index finger, discovering things, and damn, he’s walking through the building!”
This is a truly inspirational story that I had to share and would highly recommend reading or watching.
Link to Chris Downey's website:
Links to articles:
Link to video:
After reading about Chris Downey I wanted to see if there were more things like his architecture. Here were some really cool examples of what I found. To read more about them please go to the links below (in the same order as photos).
No comments:
Post a Comment