A Legacy of Imagination: CMPBS Turns 50

Driving down FM 969 in Austin, one would never imagine that just off the road lies one of the world’s most influential and progressive centers for sustainable architecture and planning: the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, known colloquially as Max’s Pot. Founded in 1975, Max’s Pot is run by Pliny Fisk III and his partner, Gail Vittori, along with a rotating cast of overall-clad designers who can be found around the center—some drafting, others welding. Fisk, who bears a remarkable resemblance to both Albert Einstein and Anton Newcombe, studied at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1960s, where he earned master’s degrees in both architecture and landscape architecture. Exposed to Louis Kahn, Ian McHarg, Ross Ashby, and others, Fisk became fascinated with systems thinking and the natural environment as they relate to the built environment, developing a rich architectural philosophy early in his career. Gail Vittori, who joined Max’s Pot in 1979, comes from an economics background and quickly became an integral part of the green building movement through her collaboration with Fisk. She became adept at navigating methods, materials, and design across local and international projects, and in 2011 was named one of the inaugural LEED Fellows for her work. 

Originally called the Laboratory for Maximum Potential Building Systems, the CMPBS office was first built for the University of Texas School of Architecture in 1973. Fisk, along with his then-partner, Daria Bolton Fisk, received the university’s approval to establish an architecture laboratory focused on forward-thinking design pedagogy, green building, and hands-on construction. True to the philosophy of green building from the outset, the Fisks rejected UT’s plan to equip the lab with standard electricity, running water, and cooling, choosing instead to figure those systems out themselves. If that sounds ridiculous, it’s because it was.

Soon after its opening, however, UT began to distance itself from the Lab. Tensions peaked in 1975 when a letter arrived from the United Nations inviting the Fisks and students to present at Habitat ’76 in Vancouver. The letter was addressed to “Max’s Pot, School of Architecture, UT Austin”—by then the accepted nickname for the Lab. The university had a fit over the use of this unauthorized moniker, to which Fisk famously replied, “Don’t worry—it’s just the United Nations, after all.” That same year, the Laboratory for Maximum Potential Building Systems became the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, an independent nonprofit. The transition was made possible by Dominique de Menil, heir to the Schlumberger oil fortune and a devoted patron of art and architecture, who told Fisk, “If you leave the university, I will help you start the Center.” And so she did. The Fisks formally left UT at the end of the fall semester in 1977.

One of the Center’s first projects was not a building but the creation of the Working Atlas for the State of Texas. The atlas divided maps into three categories: area resources, point resources, and network resources. Area resources encompassed all basic life-support systems. Point resources represented the people, businesses, and institutions that interacted with those systems. Network resources illustrated the production sequences through which currency, energy, materials, and information flowed. From the outset, the Fisks and the Center sought to reframe architecture and planning as more place-based, holistic, and imaginative—drawing inspiration from anthropology.

In 1977, Fisk briefly left Austin to help Crystal City, Texas, during an energy crisis. The Lo-Vaca Gathering Company, the town’s sole natural gas supplier, raised its prices by roughly 470 percent just before winter. A newly elected city council, aligned with the Raza Unida Party, refused to pay. As a result, Lo-Vaca cut off gas service, leaving Crystal City’s 8,100 residents without heating, hot water, or gas for cooking. Having worked with the city during his years at UT, Fisk was asked by authorities to assist. Turning to the Working Atlas, he discovered that mesquite wood was abundant in the region. Soon, hundreds of wood-burning stoves were installed, offering the city immediate relief. In another act of bricolage, the gas heaters—now rendered useless—were repurposed into passive solar water heaters. With Center staff and local residents, Fisk established a mini-factory, funded in part by federal support, that produced four heaters per day. (Crystal City was just one of hundreds of towns shut off from gas.) Through this collaboration, Max’s Pot and the community built enough heaters to buffer the city until the larger energy crisis could be resolved. Following their success, Max’s Pot’s solar water heaters soon cropped up in six other towns across South Texas.

In 1980, the Fisks parted ways, with Pliny Fisk remaining at the Center. Over the next several years, the Center worked with a variety of clients, ranging from Texas locals to Latin American revolutionaries, before developing a new prototype for the State Department of Agriculture in Laredo in 1988. Called the Blueprint Farm, this project—funded by the Meadows Foundation as part of the Texas Department of Agriculture’s Texas-Israel Exchange—became the Laredo Demonstration “Blueprint” Farm, acting as “an industrial ecology-permaculture-food-and-material-systems-integration model” for the State of Texas. In essence, the prototype farm utilizes pragmatic practices, ranging from water catchment and processing pollution from the Rio Grande through a constructed wetland to reusing agricultural byproducts to sequester invasive species.

Shortly afterward, in 1989, the Center was contacted by the City of Austin to provide ideas for a public-private partnership, which eventually evolved into the Austin Energy Green Building Program—the first program of its kind in the United States. Yes, indeed. Contrary to popular imagination, a municipality in Texas, of all states, was the first to formally incentivize sustainable design. The Center worked with the City of Austin to develop what would become the model for contemporary green building initiatives, in which the city and its subsidiaries operate as an interlinked feedback system.

The program garnered an award at the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. It also inspired the Texas General Services Commission to contract the Center to revise the Texas Architecture and Engineering Guidelines, incorporating green strategies. Just a year later, in 1993, the U.S. Green Building Council was formed (Fisk was part of the think tank that created it); by 1995, the first version of LEED began development. Thus, two major green building programs—one of which has become, essentially, the Catholic Church of sustainable design—were sparked by an eccentric group of designers off FM 969. In little more than a decade, the Center had, in no small way, achieved its original goal: creating Maximum Potential Building Systems at every scale.

In 1998, Max’s Pot expanded with the Advanced Green Builder Demonstration (AGBD) Building. The project was inspired by combining two of the 12 planning and design methods that the Center has created over the years, Eco-balance and Area Point networking. The building was constructed primarily by a local crew, supplemented with interns, with a strong emphasis on regionalism. Materials included straw, fly ash from coal power plant waste, aluminum smelting by-products, 98 percent recycled steel rebar, recycled rubber, caliche, cedar chips mixed with recycled HDPE plastic, and numerous other abundant, often overlooked regional resources. This regionalist approach was applied with so much care that every material used in its construction can be directly traced to the local area. The effort paid off, as the building became an award-winning and widely photographed project.

Around the same time, Fisk became involved with the AIA Committee on the Environment (COTE) in Washington, DC, leading to another important development for the Center. During a discussion on life-cycle analysis of buildings and materials, Fisk, never short of ideas, suggested a bold approach. Using input-output analysis of every US business from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, overlaid with the EPA’s pollution reports, the Center could associate all building material specification to pollution and economic data. The idea was simple yet radical: by using scientifically vetted existing government data, a unique marriage of the public and private sectors could occur at a national level.

Serendipitously, the EPA happened to be present at this meeting and decided that Fisk’s idea was a rather good one. They agreed to fully fund and support the project. Eight months later, the EPA had developed the beginnings of a national model, called Baseline Green, encompassing all business sectors in the country. The model traced monetary and environmental flows among approximately 12.5 million businesses—completed on those boxy, beige computers using God knows what version of Microsoft Excel.

And so, in the span of roughly two decades, the Center had earned recognition from the United Nations, prompted a green building revolution, and collaborated with multiple governments at multiple scales—including work on the Pentagon, of all buildings.  Yet despite these accomplishments, the Center remained less focused on traditional tectonics and more on progressive prototypes, protocols, and policies. As Fisk and Vittori put it, they “wanted to design systems for change, not buildings.”

Since the turn of the millennium, the Center has continued to push boundaries. In 2004 the Center collaborated with Karlsberger on the world’s first LEED Platinum hospital—the Dell Children’s Medical Center of Central Texas. Working as LEED consultants, the Center prompted yet another shift in the profession regarding sustainability’s role in health; Vittori convened the Green Guide for Health Care–the first health-based green building rating system–and was the founding chair of the LEED for Healthcare core committee. 

In subsequent years, in collaboration with UT in 2002 and Texas A&M in 2007, the Center worked with students and faculty to develop modular, self-sustaining housing prototypes for the Solar Decathlon Competition. The Center has also developed procedures for solar-powered 3D-printed Agrihoods—neighborhoods with on-site food production of duckweed—along with pollution-sequestering prototypes for skyscrapers, bridges designed to treat river water flowing beneath them, and a multimodal transportation system called the Higher Line, among other innovations.

Even after a legacy spanning more than 50 years, the Center continues to explore radical new materials, construction methods, and, most importantly, ideas. Its latest project, the Global Dream Lab, is a collection of world-changing prototype models that will be displayed in what is to become the hallmark maximum-potential building: the ARK-Hive, an evolved archive that will act in similar fashion to the AGBD Building. The ARK-Hive will house the Center’s legacy in the forms of models, plans, and bioregional games. It will also function as a space for outreach and education, serving as an example and inspiration for those wanting to imagine a greener and healthier future.

Looking ahead, the Center aims to expand more into the realm of outreach and education, aiming to become a more visible beacon and champion of the green building, and Austin’s, legacy. One thing remains consistent throughout the Center’s philosophy and practice, and that is imagination. Vittori and Fisk both hold firm that information is the greatest infrastructure, that understanding place is what makes great architecture, and that maximum potential is achieved through relentless pursuit of using what you have. If the past half-century is any indication, the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems is well on its way to continue pushing the boundaries of what potential means in architecture, and our environment as a whole.