99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-10- 99% Sound and Feel

Episode Date: November 19, 2010

Chris Downey explains it like this, “Beethoven continued to write music, even some of his best music, after he lost his hearing…What’s more preposterous, composing music you can’t hear, or designing architecture you can’t see?” Chris Downey had been an … Continue reading →

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He could only hear the construction in his mind. And as architects, we have all sorts of different ways of experiencing architecture, both in its built form, in its creation, through tactile drawings and models, besides our own mental constructions. So Chris Downey asks me, what's more preposterous? Composing music you can't hear, or designing architecture, you can't see.

My name is Chris Downey. I'm an architect. In case you haven't guessed it yet, he is a blind architect. Chris Downey lost his sight about three years ago after being an architect for nearly two decades. Clearly there wasn't any book out there on how to be a blind architect. So really the best thing to do it is just to get out there and try. And once I did that, it quickly realized that there are ways to perceive and understand drawings in design, both in two-dimensional form and in three-dimensional form, and there are any number of ways to react to it and advance it, create it, just like anybody else.

The only thing he couldn't do ultimately was translate the physical models that he can make by hand into data that he can input into a computer design program. But hey, that's not all bad. Quite frankly, it's kind of nice to have it excuse. Not to have to be the production guy. You can get past that and focus on where I could really deliver value. It started following together pretty well after that.

The key is finding the right tools. In this case, computers that talk really fast. Maybe they're the ones that have a little bit of the fastest one of five. So that's the final one of print. I can slow it down. That might be an easier rate to hear it. If you had to listen to that all day long, that's how fast the ATM machines are. When you go and listen to those

to have your non-visual access to it, and it takes so long to get to what you need to do. You gotta be faster, so you learn them, but speed less. Remember, like I'll be able to look there, but you can even do that one. Another key tool is an embossing printer

that makes a raised braille.version of the architectural plans that he's working on, unlike a sighted architect that can get a bird's eye view of an architectural plan. When Downey runs his fingers over the embossed printed page, he experiences the plan more like an actual person traveling through the building wood as a sequence of vignettes. When you do that, then you have a better chance of really putting yourself in that space and thinking about everything that's happening when you move through there. The typical sensory experience of the environment around us, 80% of it, is visual.

When your brain isn't overloaded with the visual information, the other 20% becomes a lot more important and this allows for a new appreciation for certain buildings. Like for example, a much hated old San Francisco bus terminal. The Transbay Terminals coming down, and that old space that was there, it was not a particularly delightful place. Visually it was a horrific place. All factory experience was pretty miserable too. It tended to smell like urine.

But I was lucky enough to have lost my sight and my smell. So it didn't look bad and it didn't smell bad. And there are a lot of these long ramps and incline planes if you're blind are great because all of a sudden you get directionality out of gravity, regardless of whichever way you're going up or down. If you're going uphill, you can get a strong sense of going straight uphill as opposed to sort of going off on an angle and coming downhill.

You just make like a drop of water and just fall to gravity. So those were actually kind of fun spaces. So if you ever wondered what it would take to love the old Trans Bay Terminal, the in blind and having no sense of smell seems to do the trick. Something I often talk about is sort of the touch of a building where you actually reach out and grab the building, whether it's a door handle or a railing or a place to lean against or a place to sit down. If those places offer the warmth of a comfortable touch, something that acknowledges the presence of the body besides the agenda of the eyes, you know, How can you think about the material or the form

in a way that gives you that handshake, just like you give somebody a handshake? There's a lot that's communicated through a handshake. And so what's the handshake of the building? What are you saying in that handshake? Fun and more about Chris Downey at 99%Invisible.org. Yeah. 99% Invisible is produced by me, Roman Mars, with support from Lunar.

It's a project of KALW, the American Institute of Architects San Francisco, in the center for architecture and design. you