Gail Vittori, LEED AP, is Co-Director of the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, a non-profit design firm established in 1975 dedicated to sustainable planning, design and demonstration where she has worked since 1979. She was 2009 Chair of the US Green Building Council's Board of Directors and currently serves on Board of the Green Building Certification Institute. Since 1993, Ms. Vittori has coordinated the Center's Sustainable Design in Public Buildings Program, including serving as a Sustainable Design Consultant for the Pentagon Renovation Program’s Commissioning Team from 1999 to 2006, numerous City of Austin design projects including Texas’ first public sector LEED® certified building, the redevelopment of the 709-acre former Austin airport including piloting LEED for Neighborhood Development, the new Austin Federal Courthouse with Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects, and the first LEED-Platinum certified hospital in the world, Dell Children’s Medical Center of Central Texas.
Since 2000, Ms. Vittori has been a catalyst for several national initiatives focused on greening the health care sector and advancing environmental health considerations in green building. Examples include collaborating on the development of the American Society of Healthcare Engineering’s (ASHE) Green Healthcare Construction Guidance Statement, and the Green Guide for Health Care, convened by the Center in 2002, a project of CMPBS and Health Care Without Harm. She currently serves as a Co-Coordinator of the Green Guide for Health Care and is Founding Chair of the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED for Healthcare core committee (2004-2008).
Ms. Vittori has spearheaded emerging green and affordable housing initiatives, tools and resources, including directing a Hands Across America program in 1989 that created a building materials exchange and cooperative homebuilding training program for colonias residents along the Texas Rio Grande Valley; a consultant to the DC Housing Authority to establish a green materials library and assessment process; an invited participant on the 5-person core development team of Enterprise Community Foundation’s Green Communities Initiative in 2004; and, in 2008, a successful initiative to develop green building criteria for the Texas-based Meadows Foundation capital grant funding. For more than 30 years, CMPBS has been a collaborator in community-based and participatory planning, design, and demonstration projects with an emphasis on regionally appropriate technologies and flexible, healthy and affordable building systems.
In her hometown of Austin, Texas, Ms. Vittori has been a driver of policy initiatives that have fundamentally influenced the city’s future. In 1989, Ms. Vittori proposed a conceptual framework for what evolved as the City of Austin’s Green Builder Program, the only U.S. program recognized at the 1992 U.N. Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, and the first green building program in the world. She along with Pliny Fisk oversaw the program’s early stage development through 1992. Austin’s Green Builder Program influenced the formation of the U.S. Green Building Council and LEED®, in addition to scores of policies throughout the U.S. and abroad. Additionally, from 1988 to 1998, she served on the City’s Solid Waste Advisory Commission–six years as Founding Chair–formed in response to a successful initiative co-coordinated by Ms. Vittori to cancel a proposed waste-to-energy municipal solid waste incinerator. Her work on establishing pay-as-you-throw recycling residential recycling programs, in addition to recycling programs for the City’s commercial and multi-family sectors, has led to Austin having one of the nation’s most successful recycling programs. Her work in this area continues with promoting zero waste by 2040, adopted by the Austin City Council in January 2009.
Ms. Vittori was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design from 1998-1999, and attended the University of Massachusetts at Amherst where she studied economics. Ms. Vittori is on the advisory boards of Natural Home magazine and Environmental Building News. She is co-author, with Robin Guenther FAIA, of Sustainable Healthcare Architecture, published by Wiley and Sons in 2008, was featured as an Innovator: Building a Greener World in TIME Magazine in March 2007 and, with Pliny Fisk III, in Texas Monthly’s 35th year anniversary issue (February 2008) in the article ‘35 People Who Will Shape Our Future’. In 2009, Secretary Janet Napolitano appointed Ms. Vittori to the Department of Homeland Security’s Sustainability and Efficiency Task Force.
Ms. Vittori is married to Pliny Fisk III and has two children.
Pliny Fisk
Photo by Lauren Jones
Pliny Fisk is Co-Director and Co-Founder of the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems (CMPBS), a non-profit design firm established in 1975 dedicated to sustainable planning, design and demonstration, now the oldest of its kind in the US. Pliny is considered one of the originators of the Sustainable Architecture and Planning movement in the United States, with contributions spanning four decades. Even though the Center’s non-profit work is oriented around research and education it is unique from the standpoint that it’s the prototypes Pliny has designed have been published widely with many of the foremost designers and leaders within and without the green movement. A brief list includes; Thom Mayne , Frank O. Gehry, I. M Pei, Richard Meier, Steven Hull, and product designer Jonathan Ive of Apple computer. Similarly Pliny’s work in the planning and global issues fields have been published with equally high caliber people such as Bill McDonough, Paul McCreedy, Amory Lovins, Jaimi Learner from Curitba Brazil, Paul Hawken ,Janine Benyus, Vivian Loftness, Majora Carter, Gail Vittori, Bob Berkebile, developer John Knott, and Ray Anderson of Interface Carpets in the green business sector.
Nationally he has held significant positions including being elected to the first AIA’ Committee on the Environment COTE and co-chaired the ERG the Environmental Resource Guide, the first major effort by that institution to green the profession. He was on the original Advisory board of EBN, Natural Home magazine and has been invited to Testify before sub-committees of the House and the Senate. He has appeared on CNN international as one of four people world-wide televised over 200 countries as well as Public television nationally and Voice of America. He has helped establish such organizations as the National Center for Appropriate technology, and is CEO and founder of S.E.T Sustainable Earth Technologies. Pliny presently is processing 38 provisional patent claims from construction systems to energy, water, food and material systems at home and as well as at an entire city scale, these include areas in the field of incentivized green living through the use of feedback loops at the smallest increment of our everyday relationships to the natural world.
His project experience ranges from creating the basis for the first large scale wetland in the US 1969 as his combined degree in Architecture and Landscape Architecture at U of Penn. He established the first design build course in the field of sustainability at UT Austin, the first solar collector factory in Texas, which was duplicated in several towns and manufactured over 2000 systems. He created the first flexible farm in the US for the Texas Department of Agriculture, the first state level green building demonstration, the first state wide A & E guidelines, the first city level green building program both the latter with Gail Vittori, a ground breaking national pollution flow model with 12.5 M businesses representing all GHG, criteria air pollutants, and TRI, a whole new approach to sustainable design and planning called ecoBalance based on life cycle as the framework for land planning including human guidance in the completion of life cycle events. He has been instrumental in development and subsequent deployment (in part or in whole) of alternative building materials and cements, building system designs and the design of entire sustainable city prototypes. It is estimated that this work has affected thousands of buildings in the US and abroad. He has developed prototype green building systems for Island nations including Haiti, central Texas affordable housing and Katrina where all building elements are traceable to regional resources and local skills. Pliny refers to this effort as CSArch – Community Supported Architecture which he differentiates from Public Interest Architecture due to its procedures of purposeful environmental and human skills inventory and resource balancing in an evidence based design manner.
Due to his ground-breaking work Pliny has received numerous awards including the only Earth Summit Award in Rio in 1992 shared with the City of Austin as the first Green Building program in the world. It was the only award given to the US. He has received a Presidential award for assisting in the moving of towns from the Mississippi flood. The first ever Sacred Tree Award from the USGBS for work in the public sector, The Solar Pioneer Award from the American Solar Energy Society, and been a honorary Fellow at three universities.
His publications including printed manuscripts, research papers, book chapters, and book forwards totaling well over 200. References by others total around 150 thousand. His work has been referred to in the professional and popular press including New York Times, Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Wired and many others. His work has been translated into French, German, Japanese, Chinese and Spanish. He co- authors with Gail Vittori - The Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems - 35 years of serious commotion.
Pliny has served as signature faculty at Texas A&M University. He lectures widely from whole university lectures to several plenary or keynote talks on an annual basis.
He lives in Austin, Texas and is married to Gail Vittori and has four children; Noah, Adam, Ariel and Carson.
Aaron Cloninger
Aaron joined the CMPBS staff as Site Superintendent in 2007. He is a generalist, an artist, and a human ecologist. Volunteering his expertise to CMPBS just after his move to Austin in 2005, Aaron first worked with the Center by assisting with diagnosis and repair to the photovoltaic systems. During his time at CMPBS, Aaron has been actively pursuing his goal to become a master generalist in conservation-driven adaptive strategies.
Aaron’s trade skills and construction sensibilities are built on a lifetime of experiences in the mechanical and expressive arts. This background includes over fifteen years of experience in all of the residential construction trades, and various light industrial trades.
With a Liberal Arts education from Prescott College in Arizona, Aaron’s disciplinary foci are the Visual Arts, Anthropology, Psychology, Mathematics, and Ecology. He sees education as a lifelong journey; and continues to investigate, participate in, and teach a variety of arts and disciplines.
