Paul DeFazio

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Hello, and welcome to More Than Meets the Eye with Lavender, a program that seeks to introduce our listeners to thoughtful and insightful interviews and discussions with individuals who are blind.

We will discuss a broad array of important issues that affect the lives of people living with blindness or visual impairment.

Hopefully, the topics we address will be more than meets the eye.

My name is Lavender, and today’s program will be a little different from our usual interviews.

Earlier this year, I attended a Zoom presentation by blind architect Paul DeFazio.

Throughout today’s program, you’ll hear excerpts from his presentation along with my own thoughts and reactions.

As a blind person with multiple disabilities, I’m always curious about the many ways blind people live and work independently.

Paul’s presentation raised a number of interesting questions for me, and I’d like to invite you to explore them with me.

So, my name is Paul DeFazio.

I am an architect based here in Boston.

I work in a place called the Institute for Human-Centered Design, which is a sort of an office that does a lot of different things related to accessibility and inclusive design, consulting on projects.

We do transit work.

We do work on college campuses, a lot of participatory research with disabled people.

So there’s kind of a subset of blind folks who join for those reviews, but it’s also about the sort of broader cross-disability community.

Ooh, cross-disability community.

I wonder if he’s talking about people with multiple disabilities like me, because I’m blind and I also have autism.

So I wonder what they have done for people like us.

I also do work with a group called the Critical Design Lab, which is another sort of all-disabled design collective.

Oh, wow.

That space does actually a lot more kind of experimental work around disability and access.

And so the project that I’m going to talk about today, the Blind Design Workshop, I think brings those two things together in kind of an interesting way.

The Blind Design Workshop.

Wow.

What is that all about?

Let’s find out.

So basically, I’m legally blind as of 2024.

I’m actually pretty near to being in the fully considered blind by legal status community.

I have retinous pigmentosa, which I’m sure some folks in the space are familiar with, which means that my vision has changed slowly as I’ve gotten older.

And when I was probably 12 or 13, I was pretty much just like a sighted person.

And then there’s been sort of a slow journey towards becoming blind that happened over the last probably 10 years and really accelerated about the time when I was getting my master’s degree in architecture.

And so…

Oh my goodness.

At Rice University, which has an architecture school.

And at that time, when I entered into architecture school, I was still kind of, you know, like I think one of those people who was like, oh, you know, I’m blind, but you know, it doesn’t really impact me.

I was sort of a little bit shy about kind of being open about being blind even.

I could still be sighted passing at certain times, even though it was getting harder and harder.

Wow.

I was born blind, so I can imagine it’s a different experience altogether losing your vision.

And I sort of kind of snuck in, I guess, to architecture school.

What?

But the whole time I was there, I was feeling kind of like that I wasn’t seeing a lot of people who were like me in architecture, people who are blind.

I spent a lot of time kind of Googling, like, are there blind architects?

Like, what kinds of things do they do?

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

I got to stop there because I just got to say, I really admire the fact that he did not jump to the conclusion that he couldn’t do it anymore, that he had to quit.

I love that he was Googling stuff up about how blind people do this, how blind people do that.

Wow.

Great for him because most of us would think, oh, I’m sure it’s not possible.

So bravo for him.

Wow.

It wasn’t at all obvious to me or to any of my faculty, really, after I started being more open about being, at that point, low vision and then later blind, that it was really possible for me to be an architect.

I think I had a lot of fear around that.

And so that was really kind of a journey and a progression.

Part of what really changed is that I became friends with more blind people and I also, I had a therapist who was blind and I sort of, and up until that point in my life, I really actually, I don’t think I even knew like another blind person.

I definitely didn’t know anyone else with RP and that is a very common type of blindness.

So, you know, I was kind of like a baby in the community in that way.

But I remember my first year in architecture school, one of my faculty saying to actually a different student about a different kind of problem.

Like I had a classmate who had like aphantasia.

So that means that she couldn’t picture things in her mind’s eye and she was really worried.

She was like, I don’t know if I can be an architect with that.

And my professor at that time was like, no, I think you just need to figure out how to frame that as an asset.

She said that?

To frame it as an asset?

Oh my God.

What a great professor.

I was expecting that she’d be like, well, if you can’t picture things in your mind, I’m afraid that we won’t know how to accommodate.

You know, I was picturing, you know, something, maybe not something as mean, but like, wow, what a great mindset.

It makes me think, you know, if more people in this world thought that way, we could have more disabled people designing, you know, all sorts of stuff, not just buildings, but a lot more stuff.

It was sort of one of those moments where like she wasn’t talking to me, but I felt like she was talking to me.

It really kind of clicked for me that she was saying like, you know, if you see something that you feel like is a disadvantage in this space, like you just need to think about how you can frame it and how you can present it as something that, you know, is going to actually help you become an architect.

And that was sort of the time when that seed was planted for me, where I was like, oh, okay.

I feel like that’s true with anything, not just architecture.

Sounds like if I want to be blind, I want to be an architect.

I really need to figure out how to position myself as a blind person in architecture.

And so that sort of started a journey of seeking people out, trying to figure out, you know, who are, both who are blind people in architecture and who are kind of, I was also interested in disability more broadly, like who, which architects are doing interesting work around disability.

I found a few people.

I found Chris Downey, who some of you may have heard of.

He’s a blind architect in San Francisco, and it’s probably one of the most high profile blind designers out there right now.

Hmm.

Who’s that?

I never heard of him.

He had been an architect for his entire life.

He was sighted and he, I think he had his optic nerve severed during a brain surgery.

Oh my God, that’s crazy.

And so his sight, he kind of just went out at 45.

And he was encouraged by a lot of people to, you know, to leave architecture.

And he decided, he was like, no, I’m not going to do that.

I’m going to figure out how I’m going to practice this.

Wow.

Great for him.

And it was for him like a really long journey where he, I think one of the first revelations was he just found like some wiki sticks in like a restaurant when he was like out with his wife.

And she was like, have you ever considered using these for drawings?

And he was like, kind of like shrugged it off.

He was like, no, you can use those for architecture drawings.

And then later he was like, actually, can you give me some of those wiki sticks?

Oh my God, what a brilliant idea.

Wow.

So for those who don’t know, cause not everybody knows what wiki sticks are.

They’re kind of like these sticks that they’re made out of wax and you can use them.

You can kind of mold them on to something flat, like a piece of paper and make tactile drawings out of it.

It’s kind of like pipe cleaners, but you can put them on a sheet of paper.

I use them on a cutting board sometimes if I want to draw something weird or if I want to make a weird shape or whatever.

So yeah, and they’re made out of wax and wow, what a brilliant idea for his wife to suggest that he use it to get back into architecture.

Like, oh my God, that’s so brilliant.

Sorry.

And then he started drawing on, he would print out kind of braille embossed plans that he would draw over them with these like wax sticks.

And I remember seeing that image and think there’s some sort of images of it online and hearing about it and thinking like, not only is that really interesting as a sort of, it’s interesting because it’s a way that he figured out how to practice architecture, but it’s also really interesting because it’s actually a really different type of drawing than architects usually use.

You know, it’s this sort of soft line that’s kind of waxy, it’s tactile, it’s receptive to things Like warmth, like the warmth of your hands, like makes it more pliable.

And it started making me think, like, you know, if what would architecture be like if, you know, blind people just like designed everything?

That is so true, actually, because I think we live in a world that prioritizes vision.

We have this mindset that if something is too visual, you can’t do the task.

This task can’t be done because this only one way to do it in that way requires vision.

It’s so true that that is actually the very mindset that, quote unquote, blinds us from other ways of doing something.

And what a story.

I love the story that Paul DeFazio was telling us about the man who inspired him to become an architect who is blind, you know, Chris Downey.

I got to look him up.

This guy sounds really interesting.

Like how different would it be than the architecture that we live in now, which is, of course, very, very vision centric in the way that, you know, architects, they mostly draw, they make renders and images of buildings.

And in some ways, I think that’s not really positive because buildings, you know, the practice of design is very, very vision centric, but buildings are not actually, you know, everyone uses buildings.

We use our whole bodies, our whole sensoriums in buildings.

That is so true because even though I’m a blind person and I was born blind all my life, I love houses.

I love new buildings.

I love exploring a space.

He’s correct that you don’t have to see in order to explore a space.

You don’t have to see in order to tell, hey, this is about five feet long or hey, this is about 10 inches long or, you know, you don’t have to see in order to tell like, hey, this bathroom sink is probably too big for the bathroom or whatever.

Oftentimes the aspects of it that really matter to blind people are kind of neglected, whether that’s the sort of like acoustic experience of space, whether that’s the sort of, whether that’s some of the ways that blind people navigate in space using canes, using our hands, touching things.

I think that there’s this real gap in not just in architecture for blind people, because, you know, we use the built environment.

We feel like deserve to have to be thought of and considered in that public that architects serve.

But also, I think, in the ways that we design it and in the ways that architects kind of work, you know, we have sort of a 500 year history of drawing that really doesn’t take into account non-visual ways of thinking about buildings.

So that I think started becoming really interesting to me.

And I think that critique of architecture that, you know, it’s too vision centric, really in that imagination of, you know, what would it be like if it wasn’t.

And again, that’s so true for literally anything, not just architecture.

I think that’s true for drawing.

I think that’s true for painting.

I think it’s true for a lot of sports.

A lot of things that we have created are things based on the idea that vision is the only way to experience the world.

What if it’s not?

It’s sort of what led me to where I’m at now.

So I kind of flash forward, I went through architecture school.

I was like the first blind person to graduate from my architecture program.

And at that point, this was 2024.

I wonder if he got any pushback from anyone in that school.

I had started developing a slightly bigger community.

So I met my friend Hannah, who is a, who was the first legally blind student at Harvard Graduate School of Design.

She graduated the same year as me.

We had a friend, Jesse, who we were sort of told.

Sorry, guys, that was my computer giving me email notifications.

We were friend Nola, who just graduated from UVA, and she worked with Chris.

And we just met a couple of folks from the UK, Poppy Levinson, who’s a legally blind architect, and she just graduated from, I think she’s, I’m not going to say her school because I’m going to get it wrong, but she’s at one of those schools in the UK.

Initially, she was at the University College of London, and now she’s doing her master’s.

And I want to say it’s at Goldsmiths, but I think it may be somewhere else.

And then there’s a there’s a sixth member of our group.

Her name is Emily, and she’s doing a program at the University of Westminster.

And so, and all of us were sort of in the same position where we had been blind in architecture school.

We were the only blind person in our school.

We were all sort of like, who else is out there?

Like, what’s, you know, is anyone else doing this?

And how are they doing it?

And so we formed a group to sort of start talking about that, just to say, just to share things that we found useful when we were going through architecture school, whether that is just sort of, you know, ways of working in the woodshop, ways of sort of non visual workflows for like 3D modeling, multi sensory and non visual ways of engaging space, whether that’s through close listening and field recording on sites.

And I can’t wait until we get more into this, because I have so many questions.

I, as a person on the autism spectrum, a lot of people with autism struggle with spatial issues.

I know a couple people who have spatial issues, and they are autistic, and they got better after having occupational therapy.

I never had occupational therapy, but I’ve always had poor perception of where my body’s in space.

And so, you know, something I wonder is if I ever, if I ever got into non visual blind design, like the teacher said, if my spatial issues would, again, be an asset to design, you know, that that’s a question that I have.

And also, I think some of the sort of imaginaries that we all had collectively, which was that, you know, maybe in the future, a lot of it wouldn’t just be that there’s like one or two blind people in, in your architecture program, and all your faculty are like, how are you going to do this?

And you have this sort of like, all this friction, which can be very generative for an architecture program, it sort of challenges the way that people think of who an architect is, what an architect is supposed to be like, what they’re supposed to do.

But it’s also, you know, very can be a very frustrating and uncomfortable experience.

And I think all of us are sort of, we’re interested in living in a world where it was just kind of normal for blind people to be architects, and people wouldn’t question you.

And they would just say, Oh, yeah, of course, like, of course, the blind person can be an architect, like, you know, so I think we’re, I think that’s where we kind of started from is, you know, wanting it to be really obvious and easy to imagine that blind people could become architects.

And then on the other hand, not forgetting that there is there was this sort of real friction and difficulty of like getting there.

But I’m gonna start talking a little bit about them, the project that emerged out of that.

So we’ve been doing, having conversations and doing some work together designing projects together.

And we ended up thinking about the idea of, you know, how basically how, how can we, you know, create pathways into architecture for blind people who are interested in it and not have them have the experience that we had, which is kind of like, you know, you just show up there, everyone in your life is kind of like, this seems like a bad idea.

And then you just create a bunch of friction and kind of have to have the tenacity to move through it, but actually have people tell you the things that we needed to hear when we were in architecture school, which was, you know, you belong here and here and there are things out here to support you in doing this because of course, you know, blind people live in buildings.

So we deserve to have access to the tools that people use to create buildings and make the world around us.

Otherwise, you know, we’re, we don’t have a seat at this really important table that informs almost every aspect of, you know, everyday life for most people, which is, you know, that we live in buildings and cities and landscapes and we live in a sort of designed world.

So that was something that we started talking about and we discovered about maybe six months ago, there was a guy, his name was Andrew Aguibe Lazaro, and he was doing this program in Virginia Tech called the Blind Design Workshop.

Oh, what’s that?

Which was a pre-college architecture program for blind high schoolers.

And he wasn’t the first person to do this.

Poppy had gone to a program called Architecture Beyond Sight at the University College of London.

Wait, so this is a workshop that teaches blind people how to do architecture after they graduate from high school?

Like, or before or during, like, what?

That is cool.

I wish that this was the kind of thing that existed around me when I was in high school.

I think this would have been fun.

We have one of our other advisory members, Iris Popescu, had created a similar project in Romania, but the problem with a lot of these programs is that the funding for them wasn’t really stable and consistent.

So, you know, a lot of schools were willing to kind of do like a one-off, you know, bring blind people into like a design space kind of program, but they weren’t willing to commit to it in a bigger way and in a systemic way and an ongoing way.

I guess I would be one of those students because I don’t know how much I want to get into blind architecture, States a vocational rehabilitation agency, which in Virginia, which is where he is, was called DBVR.

And because of that, he had a really secure and consistent funding source for his program.

He’d been doing it for about five years.

And I think he just completed the fifth year of the blind design workshop in Virginia just about a month ago.

I reached out to Andrew just to kind of talk to him and, you know, to figure out, you know, what are you doing?

What kinds of things are you doing in your program and how does it work?

And he was extremely generous.

And he was basically said, hey, this is a funding model that, you know, we could have blind design workshops in all 50 states because every state has a vocational rehabilitation agency.

Every voc rehab agency has what’s called pre-ETS money, which is called pre-employment transition services, which means basically you have to meet five requirements around sort of basically preparation for employment that the agency, you know, requires of its educational programs, which include things like self-advocacy and exposure to college, professional training, et cetera.

And as long as you fulfill those requirements, then you can continue to get this funding.

And this was also in a moment when, you know, a lot of schools were cracking down on things like DEI programs, especially in like the American South.

And I know that like my alma mater at Rice University is in a state where basically DEI is banned from being taught in school.

So programs that are sort of disability-centered were sort of lumped into that.

But what Andrew kind of realized through doing this was that his funding was totally safe.

Like he didn’t, he was under no threat at the school.

He was bringing in funding to do this at Virginia Tech.

Wow.

So what stood out to me here is how much this comes down to funding.

Because as someone who has spent a lot of time dealing with disability services, I know that a great idea often isn’t enough by itself.

You also have to figure out how to pay for it.

And there was really kind of, and DBVR was extremely generous.

They paid for him to fly out guests.

They paid for all of his staff and the materials.

They brought people there.

They set up a hotel.

And he said, hey, if you want, you know, I want this to be replicated in other places.

And if you want to pitch this to the Mass Commission for the Blind, like let’s do it.

At this point in the presentation, Paul mentions pitching the idea to MCB.

For listeners who may not be familiar with that acronym, MCB stands for the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind.

It is a state agency that provides services to blind and visually impaired people.

Depending on a person’s needs, those services can include things like travel training, assistive technology, vocational rehabilitation, and programs that help people prepare for employment and independent living.

What Paul is describing here is bringing his idea to the agency and asking whether it might be interested in supporting or funding a blind architecture program in Massachusetts.

I was like really excited.

I said, sure, let’s talk through it.

Let’s pitch the program.

And we pitched the program to the MCB about maybe a month and a half ago.

And they were really excited about it.

They said, you know, as long as you can sort of find a partner institution and set up a few of the logistical details and you meet those pre-ETS requirements, then yeah, we can fund this in Boston as well.

And so that was super exciting for us.

And since then we’ve been sort of just like dreaming up our, you know, what blind design workshop can look like here in Boston.

Because Boston has such a really incredible array of blind sort of culture spaces, resources that blind people use.

I’m thinking of like the National Braille Press, places like Perkins.

We have the Carroll Center here near Boston.

And so what we were interested in was creating a program that would have both an institutional partner who would represent a sort of architecture school perspective, and then a set of partners in Boston and Massachusetts who can sort of bring in the expertise that comes from the blind community and from blind culture and from the sort of knowledge that we’ve all built up together as a collective, you know, over time.

And so we’ve been sort of reaching out to different folks.

We’re sort of in conversation.

We’ve had conversations with Perkins and the Carroll Center, the National Braille Press, also with folks who work in access.

And I’ll get into a little bit more of what those partnerships look like and how they fit into the program.

And then on the other side of it, I have a currently I’m an artist fellow at the Harvard Ed Portal.

And so we have this sort of commitment and relationship with Harvard.

And so we’re basically pursuing this sort of joint collaboration between and also we reached out to the Graduate School of Design.

They were very excited about it.

We’ve been sort of like making more contacts there.

And we’re at this point pretty close to having a we’re sort of putting the finishing touches on our proposal to MCB and getting the sort of relationship set up with.

So we’re going to probably have a space at Harvard to be able to use like the woodshop and other types of kind of spaces in their building.

And the way that we kind of got them on board was to not just say like, hey, you know, this is, you know, community service for blind people, but to say, you know, this is really a challenge to architecture.

It’s a way of creating new ways of practicing architecture that are actually very innovative.

I wonder if sighted people could somehow benefit from this workshop as well.

I wonder what they would think of this whole idea if they understood it.

And it’s also bringing people into architecture who have historically not been represented in the field.

And architecture as a field, as a profession in the U.S.

has a public commitment to make the field open to, you know, the entire public who wants to study it and wants to become an architect.

And so they were pretty excited about that.

And specifically the ways that, you know, we were saying like blind people can not only become architects in like the usual way and just practice architecture.

Like for us, that’s not super interesting.

What’s really interesting to us is figuring out our own ways of making architecture and our own ways of designing and contributing in a way that is sort of makes a meaningful change to some of the, honestly, some of the worst parts of architecture, which are that it has a really intense labor culture.

It’s kind of inflexible in its design methods.

And we’re interested in creating a program that challenges that.

So it’s like we’re using architecture to reshape architecture.

Hey! From there, I’m going to talk a little bit about the program itself and what we’re planning on doing and some of the more like details that I think really bring it into focus.

So we are interested in doing a pilot in spring of 2027.

That’s what our plan is right now.

We have a couple of partnerships set up with spaces like Perkins, their outreach program with the Carroll Center so that we can test some of our education materials beforehand.

We’re currently in a sort of research and development phase.

I’ve been working with one of the fabrication spaces at Harvard thinking about how to make some of the woodshop spaces there more accessible, which is great not only for the program but also for any blind folks who become architects at Harvard in the future.

So it’s sort of a mutual, like a win-win.

I have to admit, hearing that made me smile.

One of the things I love about this project is that Paul isn’t just thinking about the blind students who might attend the workshop.

He’s also thinking about the blind students who haven’t even arrived yet.

The idea that a blind person could show up at Harvard years from now and find a woodshop that’s already more accessible because of work being done today is really exciting to me.

And that has involved things like setting up kind of like braille in the woodshops, creating tactile circulation routes on the floor that kind of tell you, that give you information about, you know, where you’re positioned in relation to some of the machines.

Wait a second, really?

And also talking to one of the shop managers about sort of like blind-friendly trainings in woodshops.

I know that also the NFB has done a lot of work in this area too.

So you folks are probably familiar with, you know, I think for some folks in another space, I would be focusing on a little more on the fact that like, yeah, blind people can use woodshops, but I’m assuming that in the space we already know that and we know that there are a lot of really amazing blind woodworkers out there.

So at this point, Paul makes a quick reference that some of my sighted listeners might miss.

So when he says that the NFB has done a lot of work in this area, he’s talking about the National Federation of the Blind.

Paul is speaking to an audience that already believes blind people can do things like woodworking and use tools safely with proper training.

So instead of spending time proving that blind people belong in a woodshop, he’s moving on to the question of how to make those spaces more accessible.

Honestly, if I were hearing this 10 years ago, I probably would have been surprised too.

A lot of sighted people have never met a blind woodworker.

That’s one reason why I find this presentation so interesting.

This part of the presentation really stands out to me.

For much of my life, I spent a lot of time…

in special education and developmental disability settings because I process information more slowly and need more support in some areas due to the autism.

So as a result, I wasn’t always exposed to many blind people doing things like woodworking or architecture or other skilled trades.

So when Paul talks about blind-friendly wood shop training, I find that exciting because it’s introducing me to a side of the blind community and perhaps a side of myself that I didn’t really know much about.

We’re doing that.

We’re starting to test some material, some assignments.

We’re starting to kind of build things.

And we’re really kind of interested in basically four aspects of blind design.

And so what we want to do is we want to create a day program to bring in these students who are interested in architecture.

Maybe it could be anyone who’s in that sort of pre-ETS transition age, which would be 14 to 22, and talking to them about a couple of different things.

One is we want to do tactile model making together and talk about the different sort of like materials and techniques and adapt traditional ways of architectural model making that are sort of a lot more visual and thinking about actually how to produce effects like texture.

Wow, that’s really interesting.

Most people think of architecture as something visual, but Paul is talking about learning it through touch.

That’s really cool.

How is everyone lip reading?

Like some tactile drawing kits so that if anyone has ever used the, it’s an object called tactile town, which is sort of a Velcro kit that’s used for orientation mobility.

We’re sort of creating a version of that that has wall thicknesses and furniture types and line types so that you can have a sort of a quick way into tactile drafting and actually like imagining architectural space through a sort of kit of parts that you can employ really easily.

I’d like to pause for a moment because Paul just mentioned something called tactile town.

And some of our listeners may not be familiar with it.

Tactile town is a teaching tool that some blind people use to learn about space, travel and navigation.

It uses tactile pieces that can be arranged to represent streets, intersections, buildings and other landmarks.

By feeling the layout with your hands, blind students can explore how different parts of an environment connect together.

What Paul is describing is similar in concept, but instead of teaching travel skills, he’s talking about teaching architecture.

Rather than using tactile pieces to represent streets and intersections, students could use tactile pieces to represent walls, furniture, doors and other parts of a building.

In other words, they’re creating a hands-on way for blind students to explore and design spaces through touch.

And this catches my attention because I’ve mentioned earlier in the program that spatial concepts can be difficult for me.

As someone who is blind and also has additional disabilities, understanding how spaces fit together doesn’t always come naturally to me.

So when Paul talks about tactile ways of exploring architecture, I find myself wondering, would something like this have helped me understand space better?

And we’re interested also in having conversations about drawing and what it means if you’re a blind person entering architecture.

One of the conventions of architecture is that you can see things like perspective and orthographic drawing.

Oh, so there was a convention that the National Federation of the Blind of Massachusetts had back in March, and one of the workshops was on tactile drawing.

I didn’t go to that one, and I was so sad to miss it.

That’s what he’s talking about, is that I think that that’s one of the things that they go over when talking about architecture.

But also I think we’re interested in questioning that and saying, you know, like one project that I really love is, that’s a sort of blind architecture project, is a space for the potter Don Katz.

He’s blind and he worked with a firm in L.A.

called KnowHowShop, and they worked almost entirely through large-scale models and construction details and building physical spaces for him to actually feel space and experience things in a more kind of real way.

So I think we’re interested in having a conversation like that with the students about, you know, what’s your reaction to drawing as a blind person?

Like, do you feel like it is sort of, because on the other hand, I would say there are folks like Tactile Media Alliance and other groups who really kind of reclaim drawing and say, hey, this is actually something that’s for us.

This is also something that blind people do.

Huh, Tactile Media Alliance, I’ve never heard of them.

I should check them out.

And, you know, it can be a non-visual practice.

And so I think bringing those two thoughts into connection is something that we want to do on the first day.

The second day that we have planned is basically using close listening in buildings.

Close listening in buildings?

That sounds really interesting.

I can’t wait to find out more about that.

And so close listening is a technique that was developed by another blind architect whose name is Carlos Pereira.

He is from Portugal.

He was another person like Chris who was sighted in architecture and then became blind later in life.

And he started doing a lot of work in clay, and he also started doing this type of site research where he would sort of go and he would listen in buildings for very long periods of time and kind of experience buildings at different times of day, listen to how spaces sound, how people move through spaces, and use that as a tool to both experience architecture and then bring that back into his design practice.

I have to admit, this is one of the parts of the presentation I’d most like to experience for myself.

The idea of spending time listening to a building and learning from the sound of a space is something I never would have thought about before.

And it also makes me wonder, would a program like this have accepted someone like me?

Because as I’ve mentioned earlier, my challenges aren’t really limited to blindness.

I find myself wondering whether there would have been a place for someone who needed more time to process information and understand spatial concepts.

That’s a question that keeps coming up for me as I listen to this presentation.

We have a connection with a teacher whose name is Jessica Chloros.

Sorry, not teacher, she’s a conservator at the Isabel Stewart Gardner Museum.

And she’s done a sort of, she’s really interested in museum access and she’s done kind of tactile workshops and also made tactile artifacts for the Gardner Museum.

Whoa, how does he find these people?

And we’re talking to her about the potential of maybe going and actually doing a sort of adapted architectural tour of that building, which is a sort of famous building by Renzo Piano.

But thinking about it through non-visual experiences of space, whether that’s temperature and sound or material and texture or the ways that people move through space are all the things that you can kind of infer from those sensory experiences of space.

And also it kind of, in that day we’re also interested in introducing one of the sort of pre-ETS requirements or one of the ways that you can fulfill the pre-ETS requirements is through doing orientation and mobility work.

Paul just mentioned orientation and mobility.

That’s the training many blind people receive to help them travel independently.

It covers things like using a white cane, finding your way around new places, crossing streets safely and building a mental understanding of the spaces around you.

If you’ve never spent much time around blind people, it’s one of those areas of training that often surprises people because they don’t realize how much technique and practice can go into something simple as getting from one place to another.

And we’re interested in doing that, but in a way that’s very much not about necessarily navigating and getting from one place to another, but about sort of the, I mean, I love the NFB’s concept of like structured discovery where you’re actually kind of exploring space and thinking about how you might explore space as someone who might be a designer.

Because as architects, like when you go into a building, you’re not just thinking about the sort of, you know, your sort of like lay person’s like first impression of a building, but you’re also thinking about things like, oh, how is this put together?

Like, what are the materials that this person is using?

What is the sort of construction?

And we’re really interested in thinking about how we can use some of the skills that come out of like the blind community and through sort of orientation mobility as a sort of field and how those can be sort of adapted to actually, you know, explore buildings in the ways that architects do.

So that’s kind of day two.

And then the second day we’re doing a second sort of site project, which would be going to the Braille Trail by Perkins.

So the first day is, the second day is sort of exploring inside.

of a building, and talking about what it’s like to be in kind of an architectural space.

And then the second day is really about the landscape that architecture is created in.

And so that’s something that we are using another technique of close listening, which is called field reporting, which I’m sure some people have heard of it.

Ooh, field recording, what is that?

But it’s just like a technique of recording and listening to space and doing so with a microphone.

So you’re actually creating a kind of artifact.

And this came from a building design that my friend Charlotte and I are doing, which is we’re sort of designing this like imaginary house at Perkins.

And we’ve been going to the Braille Trail and doing recordings every month.

And so that’s sort of allowed us to think about the site in a completely different way than architects usually do site research, which is kind of looking at, you know, big aerial views of landscapes and sort of making inferences about what it’s like to be there, as opposed to like, you know, when you’re actually there and listening, you get this totally different sense of what the landscape is like, like I have a really vivid memory of being there in January, and the river is kind of frozen over.

And they’re just like geese flying over the river.

And you can hear the echoing of the geese in the landscape.

And then in the spring, it kind of opens it up and you hear this sort of gurgling and the moments when the trees open up and reveal like the sound of the river.

And the spots where, you know, people stop and play the places where birds are making nests.

And all of these are things that aren’t really visible in sort of landscape drawings.

They’re things that are really about the embodied experience and the human scale that we experience space.

I’d like to pause for a moment, because this idea may sound unusual to listeners who aren’t familiar with architecture.

Paul isn’t recording sounds simply because he enjoys nature recordings.

He’s using sound as a way of studying a place.

Traditionally, architects might study a location by looking at maps, photographs, or drawings.

Paul is describing a different approach.

By returning to the same location month after month and listening carefully, he can learn how the environment changes over time and how people actually experience that space.

What’s especially interesting to me is that Paul and his colleagues are using those recordings to help imagine a building that doesn’t even exist yet.

In other words, they’re learning about the site before deciding what should be there.

This part of the presentation raises a question that keeps coming back for me.

Paul is describing architects spending long periods of time listening to a place and learning from the sounds around them.

Now, many of my loved ones know that due to my autism, I sometimes have difficulty filtering sounds and processing auditory information.

If several conversations are happening at once or if there’s a lot of background noise, it can take me longer to figure out what I should be paying attention to.

So one of the questions I keep coming back to throughout today’s program is this.

If I participated in an activity like this, what would I notice?

Would I hear the same things Paul hears?

Would I learn something new about space and the environment around me?

Or would my brain process the experience differently?

That’s one reason I find this presentation so fascinating.

Paul is encouraging us to think about listening not just as a way of gathering information, but as a way of understanding a place.

And so that’s something that we’re interested in kind of doing with the students and talking about, hey, you know, talking about ways that students can, you know, engage with architectural sites in ways that really center, you know, blind ways of being in the world and how that can be just as good as what we usually do as architects or even better.

In my case, I think that, you know, that exploring a site in that way is so much better than the ways that I had actually explored a site.

At this point, Paul opened the floor to questions.

Oops.

At this point, Paul opened the floor to questions from members of the audience.

While there was some interesting discussion afterward for today’s program, I’ve chosen to focus on the presentation itself.

So I have not included the question and answer portion of the meeting.

One of the things that stayed with me from Paul’s presentation was his discussion of blind ways of being in the world.

Throughout this program, we’ve heard about blind people exploring architecture through touch, sound, model making, woodworking, field recording, and other non-visual techniques.

As someone who is blind and also has additional disabilities, I found myself returning again and again to the same question.

What can I learn from the ways other blind people experience the world?

I may not have all the answers yet, but I appreciate Paul’s willingness to ask these questions and to imagine new possibilities for blind people who are interested in architecture and design.

Now, before we conclude this program, here are a few things that Paul has to say.

So, this is Paul.

I just got finished listening to the reaction audio to the talk that I gave, and I wanted to first just say thank you for taking so much time and breaking down some of the concepts in the talk, making sure that everything was clear for a sighted audience.

And I also really, really enjoyed hearing your reactions to everything.

I thought it was just really generous of you to spend so much time with the talk and to kind of get excited with me, because I’m really excited about this project.

And I had a few thoughts to share, I guess, in reaction to your reaction.

I mean, something that you brought up a couple of times during the audio that I thought was really important was how does a program like The Blind Design Workshop actually work with people with multiple intersecting disabilities?

So, in your case, you were talking about autism and blindness.

But for someone else, it might be some other co-occurring disability.

One thing I will say, too, is that we’re definitely, as we’re getting the program ready, we’re learning a huge amount about people’s different skill levels, what people are bringing to the program.

I really am a pretty firm believer in the idea that good teaching should work for everyone.

It shouldn’t just be created for people who maybe have a lot of schooling or have sort of separated themselves from the pack by being very competitive and very productive.

I really think that for a program like The Blind Design Workshop to work, it really does need to make the commitment to take anyone who would be interested in doing it.

So, Hannah and I just this weekend went down to Baltimore for a tactile art three-day workshop called Teaching the Teachers.

It was by a bunch of blind artists and people who work in technology, crafters, and it was bringing together about 40 people.

And it wasn’t 100% blind, but the vast majority of the people there were blind.

And it was talking about the fact that a lot of us in the blind community don’t really even read images tactilely yet.

There’s really a sense in, I think, the culture that we live in that images are very visual and so blind people don’t really care about them.

Or if you do care about them, the way that you should access them is with a description as opposed to actually feeling the image yourself and getting a sense of what the artist was doing.

That experience was really fascinating for me.

And it was a space where I was totally blindfolded.

I did some of my first fully tactile drawings with no sight involved at all.

And it was pretty hard.

Some of the things, I think, were very humbling.

And there were people in the group too who, I mean, there were people who had never picked up a pencil.

We started there.

We started with how to hold a pencil, how to draw a line.

We were using a tool called the sensational blackboard, which I know that you know about.

And for your listeners who might not know about it, it’s a sort of a tacky surface where you can use something like copy paper and a ballpoint pen.

And because the surface is kind of soft and has a little bit of give, the pen actually rips through the paper a little bit and it creates a tactile line.

And it’s surprisingly really, really good and really clear, the tactile lines that you can create using the sensational blackboard.

So we were starting with that.

But we talked about this idea that a lot of blind people, they don’t have the experience that a lot of sighted people have looking at images and that a lot of sighted people might take for granted that they know how to look at an image.

They might know What a word like picture plane is, the frame that goes around an image, or they might know the difference between holding up a page in portrait or landscape mode, which portrait is when the long side of the paper is oriented up and landscape is when it’s, you know, oriented kind of sideways from that.

Basically, it was important to me to think about the fact that there are actually going to be people coming to a blind design workshop who may not have any tactile literacy, they may not have made a drawing before, they might experience space in a different way.

And definitely listening to your reaction to the program has encouraged me also to think more about some of the ways that people with autism also experience space.

And there are a few architects out there who have written books about this on what they call autistic space.

And I have yet to encounter anyone who’s combined the two, who’s combined blind space and autistic space into one thing.

I think that’s, you know, a really rich and interesting area where I’m sure that if people were to explore that, especially, you know, someone like you who was blind and had autism and had lived experience and the expertise that comes with that in both of those areas, I’m sure that it would result in really amazing and different architecture.

And that’s sort of the point of the program is to say, you know, the program is really focused on blind people.

And the program is really focused on blind people.

But it doesn’t, that doesn’t mean that our philosophy is not applicable to other people with disabilities.

I think that there are all kinds of disabled people, all kinds of people in the broader disability community who have visions about what they want the world to be like.

I think that is just something that you naturally do.

You know, when the world was not built with you in mind, you have a desire for it to be different.

And that desire leads to fantasies about other kinds of places.

And those fantasies, I think a lot of us don’t have the tools to express them or don’t feel like we could actually realize them.

And design is just one way to get into a position to really make that change that you have been wanting to see and get in touch with that, you know, your fantasy for what the world could be like.

And, you know, architects get to do that all the time.

They get to sit down at a desk and imagine a building and start to think about how it would come into being.

And I think the fact that disabled people, you know, are a very small minority in architecture means that some of our fantasies are missing from that conversation.

And so I really think that even though BDW is really a project that kind of centers blindness and blind ways of doing architecture, I think maybe on some future horizon there is a version of that program that I do or someone else does, which is really about the broader disability community and the ways that we all can come together and share our own unique experiences of space, our own needs around accessing space, and the sort of vision that we have for, you know, if we could design the world around us, what it would look like and what it would be like.

So anyways, I wanted to share that reaction with you.

You’ve definitely encouraged me to learn more about autism and blindness.

I’m sure that we’ll be in conversation and I’ll learn more from you.

And again, just want to express a huge amount of gratitude for you taking the time to engage the talk so seriously and to, you know, put this message out there that blind people, autistic people, disabled people should be able to, I guess, create the world in the ways that we want.

You have been listening to More Than Meets the Eye with Lavender, a program that gives a voice to people who are blind.

We hope you enjoyed Paul DeFazio’s presentation on what it’s like to be a blind architect.

This program is a production of Audio Journal, a proud member of the Massachusetts Audio Information Network.

If you would like a hard copy of our program schedule, either in large print or Braille, please call 508-797-1117.

Archived editions of this program are available on our website, audiojournal.org, or go to the Audio Journal app on your iPhone, iPad, or Android device.

This program is supported by the Worcester Memorial Foundation for the Blind, the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind, and from generous contributions from listeners like you.

Thank you.

This is Lavender Dark Angelo, recording an audio reaction to Paul DeFazio’s Zoom presentation on what it’s like to be a blind architect.