A blind architect designs buildings you can hear

Chris Downey lost his sight in 2008, a month before returning to work as an architect. Then he noticed something on his street. He had long relied on a wind chime to find his front door, until two neighbors hung chimes of their own. He assumed his was now useless. But the neighbor uphill had chosen a higher pitch, and the neighbor downhill a lower, deeper one. "It was completely coincidental," Downey said. "But they were perfectly sonified to match the topographic condition." The accident became a design philosophy. Working with the engineering firm Arup, Downey now builds sonic blueprints, recording his cane tapping on materials and placing the sound inside virtual spaces before construction. He is currently combining a school for the Deaf and a school for the blind in Indiana, letting hard surfaces give way to a dampened passage that quietly signals the classrooms. He is not adding sound. He is letting the building make it.