A very warm thank you to Sim Van der Ryn, President of EcoDesign Collaborative, for his kind words about CMPBS and our commemorative book: “CMPBS: 35 Years  of Serious Commotion”

“This book and the people who created it -Pliny Fisk and Gail Vittori, and thirty five years of work by them and their team, is simply a Work of Nature arriving just in time to provide the planet with the handbook it needs to survive and thrive. Bucky Fuller wrote the first Operating Manual for Planet Earth. CMPBS exceeds our prescient optimist heros’ wildest dreams. Go Planet!”

- Sim Van der Ryn, President, EcoDesign Collaborative

Copies of the book are still available! Visit our book page to purchase your copy today or join us for our Discussion Panel and Book Signing on April 14, 2011!

Join us for our monthly open house this Friday, April 1 at 6:30 PM. Both of our Co-Directors, Pliny Fisk and Gail Vittori will lead guests on a tour and discuss current CMPBS projects.

If you can’t make it this Friday we hold our monthly Open House on the first Friday of every month. Visit our calendar page for more information about upcoming CMPBS events.

CMPBS Co-Director Gail Vittori will participate in a panel discussion for the 2011 Go Green Conference here in Austin, Texas on April 6, 2011. See “Conference - Go Green Austin Conference - Austin, TX” Gail sat down for an interview with Go Green preceeding the conference. The interview is available on the Go Green website here.

CMPBS: 35 Years of Serious Commotion is generating even more praise!

“This delightful book reviews 35 years of pioneering vision, research, and demonstration by the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems (CMPBS), in Austin, Texas. Through hundreds of illustrations, photographs, and descriptive text, CMPBS co-directors Pliny Fisk III and Gail Vittori tell the story of this remarkable organization.”

- Environmental Building News

“Pliny Fisk and Gail Vittori pioneered green building design and contributed much to what we currently call sustainability. With their Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems colleagues, they continue to lead in both theory and practice. We now have a wonderful book, which chronicles the many contributions of Fisk, Vittori, and CMPBS since 1975. The scale and scope of those contributions are breathtaking. They have undertaken projects from Austin to Haiti and China and beyond to the whole planet. These amazing projects have fundamentally changed how we design with nature.”

- Frederick R. Steiner, Dean, University of Texas Austin School of Architecture

Copies of the book are still available! Visit our book page to purchase your copy today or join us for our Discussion Panel and Book Signing on April 14, 2011!

CMPBS Co-Director Gail Vittori will be participating in a panel discussion at the 2011 Go Green Austin Conference on April 6, 2011. The Go Green Conference is an annual conference series for business professionals looking to integrate sustainability into business practices. In its third year, the Go Green Conference will be held in Portland, Seattle and Austin. The Austin Conference will feature representatives of local government, community organizations and business leaders. Speakers include City of Austin Chief Sustainability Officer Lucia Athens, Texas State Representative Mark Strama, Whole Foods Global Vice President Lee Matecko, and Jim Walker, Director of Sustainability for University for Texas at Austin.

Gail will sit on the panel, entitled “Mueller Development As A Model: Concepts to Reality”, that focuses on the redevelopment of the Robert Mueller Municipal Airport through a coordinated sustainability effort. The Mueller Redevelopment is pursuing certification under the LEED for Neighborhood Development pilot. CMPBS serves as the sustainability and LEED consultant for the project.

Gail will join Alan R. Bell, Director for Design and Construction for the Seton Family of Hospitals and Kent Burress, CEO of the Ronald McDonald House Charities on the panel. Seton and Ronald McDonald House Charities have both completed LEED Platinum certified projects at Mueller. Greg Weaver, Executive Vice President of Catellus Development Group will moderate the panel. The panel will take place from 11:30 to 12:30 on April 6.

For more information about the Go Green Conference or to register visit the Go Green Conference website.

Gail Vittori will present a keynote lecture for the Symposium on Sustainability in Health Care on April 21, 2011 at Wright State University in Dayton Ohio. The symposium is co-hosted by Heapy Engineering and Wright State University. The half day education symposium includes Gail’s  keynote lecture followed by panel discussions highlighting regional and national experts on health care delivery, operations and management focusing on “How should sustainability be integrated into the delivery of health care?”

For more information download the informational flyer here.

CMPBS Co-Director Gail Vittori is quoted in the article “New Environmental Designation Expected to Spur Green Health Care.” Gail discusses the forthcoming LEED 2009 for Healthcare rating system. Gail is the Founding Chair of the US Green Building Council’s LEED for Healthcare Committee.

The article is available in the February 2011 edition of Hospitals & Health Networks and online.

For more information about LEED for Healthcare, or the Green Guide for Health Care visit their websites.

Thank you to Ecology of Commerce author Paul Hawken for his kind words about our recent publication CMPBS: 35 Years of Serious Commotion!

“CMPBS’s 35 Years of Serious Commotion is a magnificent oeuvre. I hope it finds many pathways into the minds and hearts of those who want to transform the world and to those who do not understand how transformable the possibilities truly are.”

- Paul Hawken

Copies of the book are still available! Visit our book page to purchase your copy today!

Paul Kirkpatrick of Sustainability Television interviewed CMPBS co-director Pliny Fisk at the 2010 Living Future Conference in Seattle, Washington. Pliny discusses innovative wastewater treatment strategies and the Center’s microbial rockbed filter at our offices here in Austin.

For more information about CMPBS’s work with waste water treatment visit our publications page.

The interview with Pliny Fisk is available here.

CMPBS Co-Director Gail Vittori will teach a workshop on the new LEED for Healthcare rating system on Tuesday, April 5 from 12:30 to 5 PM at the 2011 CleanMed conference. CleanMed is a global conference focused on environmentally sustainable health care. The conference brings together vendors of environmentally preferable products and services and health care professionals on the forefront of implementing sustainability projects, green building design and environmentally preferable purchasing.

The 4-hour workshop will focus on the unique challenges of implementing LEED® in a healthcare setting as well as comparisons between this new healthcare rating system and the current LEED tools. Case studies of best-practices from certified healthcare projects as well as successful strategies to achieve credit intent will be highlighted.

The workshop is sponsored by the U.S. Green Building Council and the Green Guide for Health Care in partnership with Practice Greenhealth and CleanMed. Gail will be joined by USGBC’s Melissa Gallagher-Rogers, and LEED for Healthcare Committee Chair Steve Guttmann PE.

For more information about CleanMed visit the conference website.