-By Holly Richmond

Some people might consider 33 years a long time to be working outside the mainstream, pushing boundaries, being called a renegade and a maverick. For Pliny Fisk III that's life, and he can't imagine it any other way. Fisk co-founded the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems (CMPBS) in Austin, Texas, in 1975, and currently serves as its co-director. CMPBS—recognized as the oldest architecture and planning 501c3 non-profit in the United States focused on sustainable design—is much like Fisk in persona, demeanor, and eccentric qualities. Forget a fancy corporate headquarters with academic scholars traipsing the halls in three-piece suits. Instead, picture an 18-acre mishmash of buildings with wildly green-growing roofs, giant compost piles, dozens of electric cars, a few cement mixers, and countless other contraptions designed to bring everything "eco" to life—real, sustainable solutions, not hypothetical theories.

Last month Fisk talked to Contract about his maverick status, current philosophies on sustainable design, hopes for a green future, and more:

Q: Do you consider yourself a maverick?

A: The design industry and the world in general are catching up with me. I think I'm less of a maverick every passing day, which is great. My father was a microbiologist, always tinkering in nature, and my mother was a free-thinking artist. In a way, I think my career choice was predestined. I like to say I grew up in a huge compost pile. I looked out my bedroom window in Westchester County and saw gigantic tomatoes growing, and I thought that's just how the world was. I've made that practice part of my world but expanded on the idea—some may say to the extreme.

Q: How have you gained acceptance on your own terms?

A: I'm always reinventing myself. I see gaps that need filling, and I'll try anything. For example, right now I'm working on and am very excited about one particular building system: I recently had the realization that to enter an overlooked marketplace, I needed to go in through warehouses. Boring! The last thing I want to do with my life is get involved with big boxes; they're the bane of sustainable design, taking up a huge amount of land area. But if we tweak them with multiple levels of renewable energy sources, they can be the next frontier in evolutionary design. Is that being a maverick, or just seeing what we've missed for years? The team here at CMPBS works on ideas like this and gets them going on a policy level. We're not just sitting on a hilltop creating prototypes. We work on a city level, then state and federal. The Green Building Program and the USGBC are examples of our forward-thinking philosophy.

Q: How do you realize your work in sustainable design within CMPBS?

A: I see every move we make as vitally important. I have to piggyback on team projects. You can't be a maverick and be alone. You have to have a "work nest," not a "theory nest." I love to teach. [Fisk is a Fellow in Sustainable Urbanism and Health Systems Design at Texas A&M University, where he holds a joint position as signature faculty in Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Planning.] And I've been lucky that many of my students have gone on to affect change at both a state and national level. They are influential, and therefore our work at CMPBS is influential.

Q: You were once quoted as saying you weren't rich enough to truly be eccentric. If you had all the money you needed to be truly eccentric, what would you do?

A: One of the grand ideas we're incorporating is a building system company with design, engineering, and manufacturing start-up partners, all with in-depth experience in each of the three areas. The company's name is Sustainable Construction Technologies, based in Texas, and we're working on a system that can be adapted to many different materials, environmental impact zones, income levels, and build-out density scenarios. As part of this, I created what I call the "Dial a Building System Wheel," which contains all the protocols for clients to choose the system combination that best suits their needs, from housing to mixed-use to warehouses.

Q: Will negative factors in the economy such as high gas prices and the mortgage crisis help your cause at CMPBS?

A: Yes, if we are careful. It's about creating life cycle analysis measures as a design technique in order to understand and balance resources. We need to see the big picture, not just focus on alternative fuels, for example. Are they all good? No! But, that said, we can't handle everything at once. My particular focus is buildings, which are major energy users. To solve this problem we need systems thinking in a holistic sense, no Ph.D. bull. We must do our work rapidly. It's about ecology. We are part of nature. She is responsible to us, and we are responsible to Her. There has to be a shift in approach to resource utilization through transportation, manufacturing, use and reuse, recycling and disposal.

Q: What is your opinion on the current state of sustainable design trends?

A: We're going in the right direction. We need to use our ideas—which I consider to be like green-thought viruses like blogs, community projects and national green design competitions—to connect individuals to their community and the world. [Fisk heads up a team from Texas A&M competing in the Solar Decathlon, an international sustainable design competition on the Washington, D.C., Mall.] This is happening, and I'm proud CMPBS is part of that trend. However, I feel sustainable design is far too list-oriented. We need to focus on the life cycle of all of our resources like water and food, not just energy. You can't get truly sustainable design with checklists.

Q: What are your views on having once been an outsider?

The real mavericks and outsiders are nonprofits and NGOs, of which CMPBS is a part. I'm just a piece of that. I'm proud to have been a trigger, in a sense. I'm glad the design industry and the greater community are listening to us because we are not here to make big money. We are here to do big thinking.