Gail Vittori

Gail D. A. Vittori began work at CMPBS in 1979 and has served as its Co-Director since 1991. Gail oversees the Center’s Sustainable Public Initiatives Program, and provides Sustainable Design services for a range of local and national projects, including the Pentagon Renovation Program (Washington, DC), University of Texas/Houston Health Science Center (Houston, TX), and the Downtown Homeless Shelter and 911 Emergency Management Center (Austin, Texas).

Recognizing the importance of public policy initiatives as a fundamental component of accelerating the transformation of professional design and construction practices, Ms. Vittori has pursued several local, state and national projects. These include the foundation concept for the City of Austin Green Builder Program (1989); revision of the Texas General Services Architectural & Engineering Guidelines to incorporate sustainability considerations (1993); development of a sustainable design checklist for the Austin Independent School District, with Earthly Ideas (1998); and co-coordinating a national environmental health agenda for the built environment with the Healthy Building Network (2000-present).

Additionally, Ms. Vittori coordinated the popular Texas Sustainable Building Professional Training Seminars (1996-1998), and was principal author of Texas Guide to Rainwater Harvesting and The Nuts & Bolts of Greening Texas’ Public Buildings and Executive Producer of their accompanying videos.

Ms. Vittori was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design (1998-1999) and studied Economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (1972-1975)

Pliny Fisk

Pliny co-founded the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems in 1975, and currently serves as Co-Director. The Center is recognized as the oldest architecture and planning 501C3 non-profit in the U.S. focused on sustainable design.  In addition, Pliny also serves as Fellow in Sustainable Urbanism and Fellow in Health Systems Design at Texas A & M University where he holds a joint position as signature faculty in Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Planning.

In 2002, Pliny was awarded the U.S. Green Building Council’s first Sacred Tree Award in the public sector category.  He is also recipient of the Passive Solar Pioneer Award from the American Solar Energy Society, the Herrin Distinguished Fellow from Mississippi State University, the Presidential Team Award for the sustainable relocation of towns displaced by the Mississippi Flood, and the National Center for Appropriate Technology’s 15th Year Distinguished Appropriate Technology Award, recognizing significant work in the field of environmental protection.

Pliny’s special contributions in the research field have been principally in materials and methods; from low-cost building systems development referred to as open building, to wide ranging material development that includes low carbon and carbon balanced cements, and many other low impact materials.  He was instrumental in developing the first input/output life cycle assessment model for material flow in the U.S. and connecting this to a Geographic Information System, so that human activities can be placed into the context of natural systems on a national scale. The model represents greenhouse gases, criteria air pollutants and toxic releases of over 12,500,000 businesses.  He has also developed an alternative land planning and design methodology referred to as Eco- Balance Design and Planning.

Pliny received B.Arch., M.Arch., and M.L.Arch. Degrees from the University of Pennsylvania.  His graduate studies focused on ecological land planning under the guidance of Professor Ian McHarg. His work has also been influenced substantially by Russell Ackoff in various disciplines associated with the systems sciences.  

Dylan Siegler

Dylan Siegler is the Center’s Senior Design Associate, focusing on providing sustainable design and LEED consulting services to commercial, residential, civic, and heath care projects. Current projects include Austin’s Block 21, the Austin Federal Courthouse, Dell Children’s Medical Center of Central Texas, Dell Pediatric Research Institute, and Ronald McDonald House Austin, and the Energy, Water and Sustainability program of the Austin Independent School District.

Before joining the Center full time in September 2006, Dylan worked as a music critic, writer, and magazine editor in New York City and Austin. She began assisting the Center on writing, editing and publishing projects beginning in late 2003, and continues to act in that capacity. She has interned at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, was a member of the 2005 University of Texas Solar Decathlon team, and is a co-founder of the Austin green roof organization GRoWERS (www.growersaustin.org).

Dylan holds an M.S. in Sustainable Design from the University of Texas at Austin, where she completed the thesis “Green Roofs for Austin: Toward a More Progressive Model of Technology Transfer.” She holds a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied literature, classical vocal performance, feminist theory, and Spanish, and spent a year studying abroad at Wadham College, Oxford University.

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.

Mimi Kwan

As an aspiring designer, Mimi believes that our products have the ability to bring us closer to or further from our inherent nature to live symbiotically with the environment. Prior to her internship at the Center, Mimi pursued a degree in architecture at the University of Texas at Arlington, where she discovered a fondness for cooperative work, helping others, and networking through executive positions in student organizations and community design projects via AmeriCorps. Since then, she has enjoyed the spirit, nature, and biophilic atmosphere at the Center, marveling at how much she has --and has yet-- to learn. Her highlights here include graphic design, research and documentation for various projects. An aquarian by birth, her fondest memories at MaxPot include riding the tractor, playing mandolin, laying in furrows, and sneaking rides on the co-directors' tire swing.