Gail Vittori

Gail Vittori is co-director of the CMPBS and, in collaborator Bob Berkebile’s phrase, the fuel to Fisk’s fire — “COO, CFO, and the clan mother.” She appears in this archive as the operational and policy force that turned the appropriate-technology experiments of the Baer-era movement into institutional green building.

Born in Washington, D.C.; studied economics at UMass Amherst, left after her third year, and moved to Austin in summer 1977 at 22. Three weeks later a Max’s Pot open house “dazzled” her — “they were talking about basic human needs… how people control their energy, control their water, control the fundamental materials needed to build and survive.” She took Pliny Fisk III‘s fall-1977 appropriate-technology seminar, became the City of Austin’s first energy research specialist, and co-founded the Austin Women’s Appropriate Technology Collective — six women who taught themselves construction and built a solar greenhouse for a high school. She joined the Center as office manager in 1979, becoming treasurer, then co-director, and married Fisk.

Her later record is the policy mirror of the hardware history this archive documents: she proposed the conceptual framework of the Austin Green Builder Program (launched 1990, the world’s first green building program, honored at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit); stopped a proposed Austin municipal waste incinerator; convened the Green Guide for Health Care (2002) with Robin Guenther; was founding chair of LEED for Healthcare (2004) and sustainability consultant for Dell Children’s Medical Center, the world’s first LEED Platinum hospital; led the Pentagon renovation’s healthy-materials work; chaired the USGBC board (2009) and later GBCI; and was named a TIME “Innovator for Building a Greener World” (2007). Harvard GSD Loeb Fellow (1998).

See also

• Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems — co-director

• Pliny Fisk III — husband and co-director

• Daria Bolton Fisk — predecessor as co-director

• Why hasn’t passive thermal scaled? — her certification path is the counter-case to Baer’s anti-certification stance

• Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems

• Architect Magazine

• Architectural Energy Corporation

• DOE Solar Decathlon

• UK Green Building Council

• United States Air Force

Sources

• Pliny Fisk III: Creating a Maximum Potential Future (Martin, 2013)
• CMPBS: 35 Years of Serious Commotion (2010)
• CMPBS: 50 Years of Serious Commotion (2025)