Challenging Barriers: Architects with Disabilities Share Their Lived Experience

In this panel discussion, architects with disabilities will speak about their life experience. Some have been disabled since a young age; others have developed disabilities as professionals in the discipline. In addition to discussing lived experience in the profession, the panelists will also discuss the education and training of architects. When does the selection process of architecture school—and the assumptions about the mandatory abilities required in practice—start to determine who we see in practice?

Speakers:
Karen Braitmayer, FAIA, Founder and Managing Principal, Studio Pacifica
Chris Downey, AIA, Principal, Architecture for the Blind
David Gissen, Class of 1972 Professor of Architecture and Director of PhD Program, Yale University; Author of The Architecture of Disability
Jeffrey Mansfield, AIA, Design Director, MASS Design Group

About the Speakers:
Karen Braitmayer is the founder and managing principal of Studio Pacifica. Under her leadership and direction, the firm has grown in stature and scope over the 20-plus years. Early in her career, it occurred to Braitmayer that—as an architect and a wheelchair user—it was possible for her to make a unique contribution to the field. Her professional focus on accessibility and her advocacy efforts for inclusion certainly did just that. As a registered architect, Braitmayer was admitted to the prestigious College of Fellows by the American Institute of Architects (AIA). In 2019, national AIA honored Karen Braitmayer with the prestigious Whitney M. Young Jr. Award. She was the first architect with a disability to be so honored. The award recognizes architects who “embody social responsibility and actively address a relevant issue.” Most recently, she was awarded AIA Seattle’s 2025 Gold Medal Award, honoring her dedication to supporting equity and full inclusion for persons with disabilities in the built environment.

Chris Downey is an architect with over 30 years of professional practice—continuing without sight since 2008. Leveraging this altered perspective as a unique value, he now specializes in universal design for projects for the blind and visually impaired including eye clinics, rehabilitation centers and schools for the blind while also consulting on other projects including museums, cultural centers, tech offices and transit centers. Downey has been featured in numerous media stories including “60 Minutes” with CBS News, has exhibited internationally including the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and speaks globally for Fresh Speakers with a TED talk that has been viewed well over a million times. Downey currently serves as chair of the California commission on disability Access and is on the “Building Blind Ambition” capital campaign for Enchanted Hills Camp owned and operated by the San Francisco LightHouse for the Blind and Visually

Impaired David Gissen is a historian, designer, and theorist of architecture. He studies how physiological and environmental ideas are embedded in modern and late-modern architecture and design. He is the author of four books, including The Architecture of Disability: Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes beyond Access (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) and Subnature: Architecture’s Other Environments (Princeton Architectural Press 2009). Gissen has also published numerous essays for journals, magazines, books and exhibition catalogs. His architectural and urban proposals have been exhibited at the Venice Biennial and Victoria and Albert Museum, among other venues. He is the inaugural Class of 1972 Professor at the Yale School of Architecture and the Director of the School’s PhD program. He has held additional academic appointments at The New School, Columbia University GSAPP, MIT, The Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and the California College of the Arts.

Jeffrey Mansfield is a design director at MASS Design Group, whose work explores the relationships between architecture, landscape, and power. Currently, he is researching how Deaf schools and other Deaf Spaces emerged as sites of cultural resistance in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, initiated with a grant from the Graham Foundation and the John W. Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress. Mansfield also co-edited MASS Design Group’s first monograph, Justice is Beauty (The Monacelli Press). Mansfield’s work has been published in the Cooper Hewitt Design Journal, AD, Tacet and exhibited at MoMA PS1, Bergen Assembly, Sao Paulo Biennale, the Sharjah Biennial, and Tallinn Art Hall. Mansfield holds a Master of Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and an AB in Architecture from Princeton University. Mansfield has been deaf since birth and attended a deaf school in Massachusetts, where his earliest intuitions about the relationship between aesthetics, power, and society emerged.

If you register for a virtual ticket, you will receive an email with a Zoom link to access the program.