A social worker tried to tell him about 'career alternatives' after he lost his sight, but Chris Downey wasn't about to stop being an architect.
At age 45, Chris Downey had pretty much constructed the life he'd always wanted. An architect with a good job at a small housing firm outside San Francisco, he was happily married, with a 10-year-old son. He was an assistant little league coach and avid cyclist, and then - doctors discovered a tumor in his brain. He had surgery, and the tumor was safely gone, but Downey was left completely blind.
Lesley Stahl: Here you are in a profession that basically requires you to read— read designs and draw designs. You must've thought in your head,"That is insurmountable?"Lesley Stahl: You never thought— you never thought the word"insurmountable?" Chris Downey: I was fascinated— walking through buildings that I knew sighted. But I was experiencing them in a different way. I was hearing the architecture, I was feeling the space.Chris Downey: It was sort of this— this excitement of,"I'm a kid again. I'm— I'm relearning so much of architecture." It wasn't about what I'm missing in architecture, it's what— was about what I had been missing in architecture.
Bryan bashin is executive director of the non-profit LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired in San Francisco, and is blind himself. Within a few months he was travelling the streets on his own and getting back to normalcy with his son.The first Father's Day came up, Rosa was like,"So, what do you wanna do? Do you wanna go on a picnic, go on a nice lunch?"I wanna play baseball." "with Renzo." Renzo was like— he pops up. I could just— I could feel him, like, jump to the edge of his chair.
Chris Downey: If you're blind, you don't drive. Right? They don't like it when we drive. So— you know, we're committed transit users. So the question was,"How on Earth do you navigate this size of facility, if you're blind?"Chris Downey: I would just follow this, following those grooves.
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