Flaunt-a-Friend Friday!
Pliny Fisk III, Austin's own "Godfather of Greenbuilding"

I first met Pliny about 4 years ago at one of the Center for Maximum Building Potential's monthly open houses I attended with mosaic tile master Craig Lopez. I didn't know a whole lot about greenbuilding or methods for environmentally-conscious living at that time, but soon became fascinated with the incredible environment that Pliny and his partner Gail Vittori had created out on FM969.

Back in 1975, while serving as assistant professor at the University of Texas’ School of Architecture, Pliny co-founded the CMPBS, an independent non-profit research and educational firm that concentrates on the interrelationships between the built and natural environments with a focus on sustainable community and local economic development.

The center’s broad agenda includes work and research in the areas of environmental planning and policy, environmental hazards, sustainable community planning in underrepresented communities, environmental justice, green architecture and construction, sustainability theory, materials science, life cycle assessment, building systems, and patent and product development.

Since the center's inception, Pliny has had a pivotal role in moving this agenda forward in four areas: architecture, master planning, participatory gaming and quantitative methods.

“CMPBS' body of work reflects the importance of recognizing the international protocols of life cycle assessment, geographic spatial analysis, and the footprint representation of sustainable technology as not limited to purely technical methods, but as a basis for public and client awareness and understanding” Fisk explained. “This new interpretation and visualization framework accepts interoperability between diverse disciplines as key in the creation of iconographic sequences, pictorial computer modeling, and infinite scaling procedures that literally interconnect the actions taken at the home level to those at a national or international level.”

A project exemplifying CMPBS’s work in these areas was the co-development of BaseLineGreen™, a modeling tool used to establish the environmental and economic baselining of generic building types. The center used this methodology in several green specification projects including work for the Pentagon Renovation Program in Washington, D.C., the NIST EpiCenter in Bozeman, Mont., the UT/Houston Health Science Center in Houston, Texas, and Seattle Green Building initiatives in Seattle, Wash.

CMPBS architecture projects include the internationally published Advanced Green Builder Demonstration and the Laredo Demonstration Farm. Additionally, the center developed an ecological land planning procedure, “Eco-BalancePlanning™,” which it has employed in master planning projects totaling more than 11,000 acres.

With CMPBS, Fisk has received several national and international awards including the United Nations’ Earth Summit Award, presented in 1992 at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro Rio. The award recognized the center’s work with the city of Austin in creating the world’s first Green Builder Program. He has received the American Solar Energy Society’s 2000 Passive Solar Pioneer Award, the first Sacred Tree Award for “significant contributions to the advancement and transformation of green buildings in the public sector” from the U.S. Green Building Council in 2002, and the Presidential Team Award for contributing to the plan for moving towns relocated by the Mississippi Flood.

You can read more about Pliny in popular magazines such as Dwell and Metropolis. Or check out his team website for the U.S. Department of Energy's 2007 Solar Decathlon to see his brilliance in action!

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