Outstanding! Building Tour of LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired

May 9, 2017

For many years, I had walked by the former location of the LightHouse for the Blind on Van Ness Avenue but never stopped to visit the facility. Thus, I was very interested in seeing the new LightHouse at 1155 Market Street, a building I was familiar with because it housed several City agencies which I had visited.

I arrived a little early and explored the surrounding neighborhood. This node of Mid- Market Street is one of the more pleasant ones with a variety of activities taking place such as the Civic Center Farmers Market on Wednesdays, the fountain of the UN Plaza, the Orpheum Theatre, the Main Public Library, and just west of 1155 Market Street, a huge, unattractive housing development which is not yet completed and will have a row of stores along Market Street. Further west on the south side of Market Street is the historic Hotel Whitcomb, the new Dolby headquarters, and, beyond 9th Street, the Twitter headquarters in the old Art Deco Furniture Mart – all attracting people of different ages and backgrounds.

At 1155 Market Street, the LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired occupies the upper three floors and offers a variety of state-of-the-art services to its clients in a rich and bright environment: on-site optometry exam rooms; a retail store selling adaptive technology devices; training rooms for hands-on learning of Braille and other skills; a training kitchen for learning low-vision cooking techniques; a large multi-purpose room for LightHouse and community events; administrative offices; audio and video recording facilities and eleven dorm rooms where up to twenty-nine clients can stay on-site for immersive training and community-building. The large windows allow fascinating views of the Civic Center with the dome of City Hall and downtown.

We learned that people tend to think that they get a Seeing Eye dog when their sight fails; however, training is required for the many adjustments to daily life. These services are provided in the LightHouse. The lower floors are rented by City Departments and supply rental income which, in addition to a generous bequest by Donald Sirkin and other donations, is used to pay for the 2015 acquisition of the LightHouse Building and its upkeep.

What impressed me the most were the results from the tremendous attention to detail. Whether it was the concrete floors in the hallways allowing a blind client to hear if somebody is approaching, the colorful felt covered panels in the meeting rooms reducing the noise, metal rings low near the floors to secure the leashes of guide dogs, hooks high up on the walls for hanging up the white guide canes when not needed during meetings, or art projects for tactile enjoyment everything was carefully planned. Experts in tactile graphic design even developed the building plans so that the project could be discussed in non-visual communication by everybody.

This tour was a visibly outstanding lesson in design. One reason was that Chris Downey, president of the LightHouse Board of Directors, is also an architect and a thoughtful consultant of environments for blind persons and is blind himself. He was present for the tour and explained the many design concerns brought forward during the renovation. He touched on the character of the space to be lively and bright and requiring some code changes to be negotiated with the City for the special needs of the blind users. Time was taken to specially design the stair handrails for a sturdy, welcoming handshake. Even the counter tops were notched to catch the guide canes when standing in front of the counters. It was such a wonderful lesson in how to go about designing, no matter what kind of a facility you might be planning for. As Mr. Downey said “many small caring design decisions accumulated to make this the lively facility we wanted it to be, as people often have misinformed ideas about how blind people feel in a space.”

Katy Perrings Hawkins of Mark Cavagnero Associates, project manager of this 13 million dollar renovation project, was the envy of us all. The tour highlighted the wonderful example of carefully designed architecture, where the collaboration with the client is very helpful in setting the standards for architectural excellence. She did an outstanding job. On leaving, Wendy Bertrand encouraged Katy to write up her experiences working on the project to share with the profession. Not only was the tour architecturally outstanding but it introduced many of us to social stigmas and myths about loss of sight. The lighting design in this project is unique.

We hope that readers of this article will appreciate the importance of scheduling a variety of OWADP events, highlighting different aspects of architecture and the design professions we work so closely with.

By Inge Horton (first part) in collaboration with Wendy Bertrand (second part).