Edd Soenke grew up around a drafting board and carried that childhood experience into a career in architecture. His father, Louis, was one-half of the Soenke & Wayland firm in Davenport. He also developed a fascination with flight, so it was only natural that he tried to combine the two, entering the U.S. Navy and hoping to become a fighter pilot. However, too many years in Iowa State University’s design labs had caused his eyes to get weak, he said, and he couldn’t pass the Navy’s eye exam. So much for being a Navy pilot. Instead, he has become a flying architect — his eyes are good enough to obtain a commercial pilot’s license — and carries his skills across seven states, and then some. “It gets in your blood,” Soenke said. “You get uptight and your wife says, ‘Go fly.’” For the last seven years, some of those travels have been in pursuit of design standards that take into account the needs of people with low vision. He received the top national award in January from the National Institute of Building Sciences for work that led to the publication of “Design Guidelines for the Visual Environment” by the Low Vision Design Committee, a group of 25 designers, government officials and a Mayo Clinic representative that Soenke chaired. Soenke’s design work has taken him to Russia and Europe, not to mention rural Iowa, where he has been busy in recent years designing environmental learning centers. “You’d be surprised how cosmopolitan Iowa is, especially Des Moines,” he said. “We have no problem on the international scene.”
 
You worked with a committee of 25 people. How did that work out?
When you get 25 experts in a room together, they all have their own ideas. It’s like herding cats. You have to tame them a little bit. One-fourth of the committee has serious vision problems, but coming to a consensus was a challenge. They put me in charge of that because I’m a good talker.

What are the issues for people who are visually impaired?
We looked at contrast and glare. As your vision decreases, your delineation of ceiling, wall, floor tends to get into a little bit of a maze, especially on stairs if they are not lit properly or designed to the point where there is not a lot of contrast. So we worry about that a lot. The thing that is kind of hot these days is daylighting, which is a good thing, because it helps you psychologically, but it can add a lot of glare too, so we have to control that daylight and there are a lot of ways to do that.

There isn’t a lot of contrast in contemporary architecture.
We don’t think about contrast, and that is true of a lot of architects. You have to have contrast. But it isn’t just the building itself; it’s the whole sight grounds. Now with the advent of LED lighting, it opens up a whole other aspect that we didn’t deal with before because you have that color shift change; people with low vision sense that more. It can be very confusing, especially on wayfinding when you are trying to light signs. One example was Mayo Clinic (in Rochester, Minn.); it’s one of the worst spaces I’ve ever seen. It’s hard to find your way around there. 

What has been the reaction from other architects?
Good. One of the guys in Des Moines is a lighting specialist at Modus (Engineering Ltd.). He is fantastic; he’s really getting involved with it, because he knows that manipulating the color and intensity of light is an important thing. That is the beauty of LED; you can make the shape the way you want it, especially in care facilities for old people.

How did you wind up working in Russia?
We set up the first privatized construction and development company in Russia in 1991. We worked with (Russian President) Boris Yeltsin’s minister on the environment. During the Clinton administration, the U.S. was pumping $2.9 billion a year into Russia, mostly for nuclear nonproliferation. They said they needed help on all of that stuff. We went over and helped them on that and in the process did quite a lot of other projects.