What quickly emerges after sitting down to talk with co-directors Pliny Fisk III and Gail Vittori, during an afternoon lull in a hallmark season for the Austin-based Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems (CMPBS), is that 50 years of doing has not slaked its thirst for more of it. Its propulsive impulse to ask questions, generate ideas, and pitch schemes will remain one of the Center’s inspirational and lasting legacies. And its many achievements are proof its “commotion” is to be taken seriously. As Fisk remarked, “The commotion is deliberate and all about being consequential—it’s the opportunity for a small non-profit organization to gain visibility and have influence on the most compelling issues confronting the built environment. Whether it be constructing concrete structures with no Portland cement, operating a fully water-balanced building, or having an on-site wastewater treatment system.”
Since its inception in 1975, the work of the Center, known colloquially as Max’s Pot, has expanded in influential and exploratory ways. Projects span sustainability consulting, ecological planning and design, education, policy, and combinations of all the above. As pioneers in the field of sustainability, the organization is rooted in a systems-based approach; it embraces and intertwines theory, practice, methodology, and data in its work and experimentations. For example, design prototypes have a strong theoretical undergirding; and conceptual frameworks, laid out in meticulously crafted graphic language and rich visual displays, bake measurable information into proof of concept. In true 1970s form, as the design community sought forward-thinking solutions, Fisk, and Vittori, who joined in 1979, forged Max Pot out of whole systems design, ecological awareness, a technological optimism grounded in ethics and human wellbeing, and a spirit of invention.
Out East
A visit to the Center’s compound along FM 969 in East Austin feels like submersion into an alternative construction reality. At its core stands the Advanced Green Builder Demonstration Building (AGBD). Built in 1998, at the end of the decade that saw the development of the green building movement of which Fisk and Vittori were key players, the AGBD feels like the organization’s central brain. A sort of living laboratory, the building still houses the organization’s main office and showcases an impressive agenda of local material integration and resource accountability, including on-site water and wastewater bioprocessing. Other structures include two award-winning entries to the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon Build Challenge, which host other functions and flank a long covered social space that has served as venue for events, open houses, and parties too numerous to count.
The compound bursts with the physical products of thought processes, idea trajectories, and material provocations—whether occupiable buildings or manipulable objects. As a place, the Center directly manifests beehive activity. It feels like a living, breathing Venn diagram, holding an unmistakable center amid spoking multiscalar investigations in form, function, and whimsy. Even more outbuildings and experimental structures are nestled into the wooded prairie landscape, continuing a long succession of earnest prototyping, many of them employing the trademark 12 lenses, a set of protocols developed by the Center to guide design toward a maximum potential future.
The range of work the co-directors have set in motion, and developed with a long line of collaborating associates, is wide and web-like, and shows its ample spheres of influence. Its significant contribution to the origin and growth of the U.S. Green Building Council and the Austin Energy Green Building Program (a precursor to LEED) is a notable highlight. Others are the Laredo Demonstration “Blueprint” Farm, an early built project; and a longstanding interest in utilizing regional supply networks, decades before it became fashionable to research circular building techniques and advocate for responsible material sourcing as part of an architect’s role.
Vittori’s foundational work in elevating wellness in the sustainable design and operation of healthcare facilities have also had a transformative impact in that sector. She noted, “The opportunities to move from protocol to policy, like creating the concept for what became Austin Energy Green Building and establishing health as integral to the definition of green building, are exemplars of our work and our purpose.”
A Rhizomatic Network
The recently released monograph, Max Pot was issued to mark the occasion of the Center’s 50th anniversary, brings together a bountiful bouquet not only of what the organization has done, but also with whom, and in its own words. The rich stories of those in its extensive cohort makes it clear how deep the roots, offshoots, and connections of the organization travel. This outer orbit community of practice, in places far and wide, carries the passion of CMPBS.
“The people who join us, whether as interns, staff or volunteers, often comment that they’re challenged to think differently and stretch their sense of what is possible. The Max’s Pot diaspora continues the serious commotion at a scale and diversity of contexts we could only imagine,” Fisk and Vittori reflected.
Five decades later, in the context of unprecedented climate and environmental disruption, its unique melting-pot practice and unerring boldness are as relevant and critical as ever. Thus, a retrospective view of the Center’s accomplishments is just as importantly an opportunity to look ahead, acknowledge our present sense of urgency, and apply ourselves in a similar vein. As Fisk remarked, “We are too serious about nothing and not serious enough about what we have to do.” At a recent bioregional confluence event, Vittori impressed upon attendees: “We have the tools. We know the solutions. We need to start using them; we need to start doing.” Whether taken as admonishment or encouragement (or both at once), the statement speaks to Center’s big idea: We must cultivate deep capacities for doing better in the built and natural world.
Next Steps
What is next for the Center, its 2.5-acre headquarters, and its continued influence? It seems body, mind, and heart intend to remain intact and integrated. The co-directors are committed to honoring the Center’s deep ties to its site while plotting next moves to safeguard its intellectual wealth, carry it forward, and actively share it. It envisions, in a masterplan refresh of its small campus, creating an ARK-Hive as container for the diverse work of the organization. “How do we redefine what an archive is to give it the relevance and systems-shifting capacity needed to confront the urgent challenges of these times?” Fisk posed. A distinctly “alive” archive that threads the past with the future, the ARK-Hive is intended to be an engaging facility with an interactive program that is both accessible to the public and an ongoing resource to a continuing cohort of collaborators. Beyond cementing the Center’s legacy, it would serve as a wellspring for new ideas and a reinvested place of practice.
More than anything, Max Pot has been a laboratory that never stops scouting for problems to solve. New project schemes, sparked by critical gaps and assembled from keystone ingredients, become the currency of solutions. The Global Dream Lab, a growing collection of “high-impact proposals,” exemplifies its focus on curating ideas and shaping critical relationships in response to a pressing need, using an unfettered imagination to visualize the combined package of what it will take to shape the future of architecture and design within the context of our rapidly changing environment. The boldest doers often start as the most undeterred dreamers. Agrihoods that forge food from duckweed and river-cleaning bridges may be just around the corner.
Lauren Woodward Stanley, AIA is a practitioner, writer, and co-owner of Austin-based Stanley Studio.
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