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 is the 2009 Chair of the U.S. Green Building Council’s Board of Directors. 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 considered one of the originators of the Sustainable Architecture and Planning movement in the United States, with contributions spanning four decades. He has been instrumental in formulating local and national policy on green building, creating design and engineering criteria for flexible building systems, developing new methods for ecologically based planning, and pioneering regionally appropriate, sustainable materials.
Pliny’s early teaching experience in the 1970s resulted in the creation of one of the first design/build courses in sustainable architecture offered in the U.S. Over the years, he has developed processes and plans for eco-industrial interventions at many scales. Areas of expertise include:
-Resource balanced design and planning methodology for buildings and communities
-Research and demonstration focusing on materials life cycle, industrial ecology, and the reuse of by-products in building materials and systems.
-Procedures for working with life cycle as a series of events at the building scale fostering human intervention and understanding
Pliny’s work has earned several national and international awards and recognitions. He was featured with CMPBS Co-Director Gail Vittori as one of 35 futurists in Texas Monthly’s 2008 35th anniversary issue and in the 2006 Visionaries issue of Metropolis Magazine. He served as Lead Principal Investigator for the 2007 Texas A&M Solar Decathlon entry for which the team received 1st Place: Appliance Category, Department of Energy; 1st Place: AIA Committee on the Environment Student Choice Award; and 1st Place: Student building category, EPA LifeCycle Building Challenge. In 2008 Pliny was appointed to the national peer review committee for the General Services Administration for federally funded buildings. Additional awards include:
-In 1992, the only Earth Summit Award recognizing a U.S. project, shared with co-director Gail world.
-In 1996, The Presidential Team Award for contributing to the sustainable relocation of towns in response to the flooding of the Mississippi River.
-In 2000, the Passive Solar Pioneer Award given by the American Solar Energy Society.
-In 2002, the first public sector Sacred Tree award given by the U.S. Green Building Council.
Dylan Siegler
Dylan Siegler is the Center’s Associate Principal, 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 Pediatric Research Institute, the Lance Armstrong Foundation, and the Energy, Water and Sustainability program of the Austin Independent School District. Recently completed projects include Dell Children’s Medical Center of Central Texas, the first acute care hospital in the world to achieve LEED Platinum certification, and its neighbor, Ronald McDonald House of Austin and Central Texas, the first LEED for New Construction project in the Austin area to be awarded LEED Platinum certification.
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.com).
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.
