Proceedings of: Workshop on Improving Building Design for Persons with Low Vision

Siting of Buildings

We’ll talk about a few issues that are important here to guide this workshop. Siting buildings – these are old principles. We site to improve and reduce glare but we also site to harvest and make best use of natural daylight (slide 9). We have urban design issues to deal with, but we can use tools in the building’s configuration, details and siting to take best advantage of solar orientation to make that building effective as a building as well as it’s beautiful in its architecture and construction.

So we look to control light. We look to integrate the indoor and outdoor spaces so that the pathways – and I think one of us, we were talking about this earlier – the pathways, as you come to an entrance, as you negotiate the site, aren’t weird or clever, but they’re actually somewhat obvious. The building should identify its entrance, should celebrate its entrance and should make the entrance and the experience and going to the entrance something that is celebrated.

Exterior Design (slide 10)

We need to develop transitional spaces that take us from the interior to exterior so that the eye can adjust as you go in and out of buildings so that you’re not going from complete brightness to complete darkness. Here’s an example where that’s nicely done and you can see that the light transitions across that space (slide 10). But stairs and ramps and all these things have to be negotiable. So we have to have attention to how they’re detailed, colored, textured and configured in a way that they are easily negotiated by all populations.

Interior Layout and Design

Interior layouts need to be logical. They shouldn’t be so clever that they’re hard to negotiate or find your way around. I think we were talking about that again earlier. You shouldn’t need to have – they need to be logically laid out buildings and then architecturally defined in ways that are elegant. In this case though (slides 11 and 12), we see some nice examples of transitions between the daylighting, the day-lit exterior into the interior through various architectural means. So there are some positives to see here.

Definition of doorways and escalators and stairways and elevators – these need to be things that are not lost in the blur of white or monochromatic architecture but are actually easily found and identified by all persons. This includes reception, windows, assembly and meeting rooms. All these things should be easily found by the person who negotiates these spaces.

Now, this may seem a silly thing to think about, but if you blurred your vision, you might wonder what you’re aiming at (slide 13). We must use electrical lighting. It’s a need, but we have tremendous tools available to us to control that light and control the quality, configuration (slide 14). We’re going to hear from experts throughout this workshop on just that subject and what the things we can do.

Interior design. Perhaps if we look at finishes: floors, ceilings, color, value, contrast, furniture and arrangement and configurations of spaces, we can actually read and understand some of these spaces. Here’s a central [corridor] space (slide 15) [in which] and you may see positives and negatives. Let’s look at what we’re doing in interior design finishes, colors and textures, reflection and we have tools now available to us to actually study those things. Revit [computer aided design] allows us to look at light interaction and surfaces in order to study and provide effective design for these spaces.