Gail Vittori

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Gail Vittori (born October 7, 1954) is co-director of the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, a non-profit design firm established in 1975 dedicated to sustainable planning, design and demonstration [1] [2] where she has worked since 1979.

Contents

Work

Since 1993, Vittori has coordinated the center's Sustainable Design in Public Buildings Program, including serving as a sustainable design consultant for the Pentagon Renovation Program's Commissioning Team from 1999 to 2006, numerous City of Austin design projects including Texas's first public sector LEED certified building, the redevelopment of Austin's 709-acre (2.87 km2) former Robert Mueller Municipal Airport including piloting LEED for Neighborhood Development, [3] the new Austin federal courthouse, and the first LEED-Platinum certified hospital in the world, Dell Children's Medical Center of Central Texas.

Beginning in 2000, Vittori led several national initiatives focused on greening the health care sector and advancing environmental health considerations in green building. Examples include collaborating on the development of the American Society of Healthcare Engineering's (ASHE) Green Healthcare Construction Guidance Statement, and the Green Guide for Health Care, convened by the center in 2002, a project of CMPBS and Health Care Without Harm. She currently serves as a co-coordinator of the Green Guide for Health Care and is founding chair of the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED for Healthcare core committee (2004–2008). Vittori was the 2009 chair of the U.S. Green Building Council's Board of Directors. [4] In 2009, Secretary Janet Napolitano appointed Vittori to the Department of Homeland Security's Sustainability and Efficiency Task Force. In 2011, Vittori was appointed to the GBCI (Green Business Certification Inc.) Board of Directors, and has served as its chair from 2014 to 2019. She is a founding board member of the Health Product Declaration Collaborative, and has served as vice-chair from 2015 to 2019.

In 1989, Vittori proposed a conceptual framework for what evolved as the City of Austin's Green Building Program, the only U.S. program recognized at the 1992 U.N. Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, and the first green building program in the world. Along with Pliny Fisk III, she oversaw the program's early stage development through 1992. Austin's Green Builder Program influenced the formation of the U.S. Green Building Council and LEED, in addition to scores of policies throughout the U.S. and abroad. Additionally, from 1988 to 1998, she served on the city's Solid Waste Advisory Commission, six of those years as founding chair, a committee formed in response to a successful initiative co-coordinated by Vittori to cancel a proposed waste-to-energy municipal solid waste incinerator. Her work on establishing pay as you throw recycling residential programs, in addition to recycling programs for the city's commercial and multi-family sectors, has led Austin to having one of the nation's most successful recycling programs. Her work in this area continues with promoting zero waste by 2040, adopted by the Austin City Council in January 2009. Vittori is on the advisory boards of Natural Home magazine and Environmental Building News.

Books and selected media

Education and personal life

Vittori was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University Graduate School of Design from 1998 to 1999, and attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst where she studied economics. She is married to Pliny Fisk III and has two children.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sustainable architecture</span> Architecture designed to minimize environmental impact

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">LEED</span> Standard for green building design

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">U.S. Green Building Council</span> Non-profit organization that promotes sustainability in building design

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pliny Fisk III</span> American architect

Pliny Fisk III is a co-founder and co-director of the "Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems" (CMPBS), a sustainable design and planning 501c3 non-profit established in 1975. Fisk also serves as Fellow in Sustainable Urbanism and Fellow in Health Systems Design at Texas A & M University, where he holds a joint position as signature faculty in Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Planning. Fisk has previously held positions at: Ball State University, The University of Texas, Mississippi State University and the University of Oklahoma.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sustainability at American Colleges and Universities</span>

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sustainable urbanism</span> Study of cities and the practices to build them

Sustainable urbanism is both the study of cities and the practices to build them (urbanism), that focuses on promoting their long term viability by reducing consumption, waste and harmful impacts on people and place while enhancing the overall well-being of both people and place. Well-being includes the physical, ecological, economic, social, health and equity factors, among others, that comprise cities and their populations. In the context of contemporary urbanism, the term cities refers to several scales of human settlements from towns to cities, metropolises and mega-city regions that includes their peripheries / suburbs / exurbs. Sustainability is a key component to professional practice in urban planning and urban design along with its related disciplines landscape architecture, architecture, and civil and environmental engineering. Green urbanism and ecological urbanism are other common terms that are similar to sustainable urbanism, however they can be construed as focusing more on the natural environment and ecosystems and less on economic and social aspects. Also related to sustainable urbanism are the practices of land development called Sustainable development, which is the process of physically constructing sustainable buildings, as well as the practices of urban planning called smart growth or growth management, which denote the processes of planning, designing, and building urban settlements that are more sustainable than if they were not planned according to sustainability criteria and principles.

Healthy building refers to an emerging area of interest that supports the physical, psychological, and social health and well-being of people in buildings and the built environment. Buildings can be key promoters of health and well-being since most people spend a majority of their time indoors. According to the National Human Activity Pattern Survey, Americans spend "an average of 87% of their time in enclosed buildings and about 6% of their time in enclosed vehicles."

References

  1. "A concrete solution". CNN . October 1, 2009. Retrieved July 26, 2012.
  2. "Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems - Building a Sustainable World Since 1975". Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems. Archived from the original on October 5, 2012. Retrieved July 26, 2012.
  3. Gregor, Katherine (November 20, 2009). "Developing Stories: Greening the Neighborhood: Mueller earns LEED-ND". The Austin Chronicle . Retrieved October 23, 2013.
  4. "Gail Vittori". U.S. Green Building Council.
  5. Hylton, Hilary (April 27, 2007). "Building a Greener World: Director: Gail Vittori". Time . Archived from the original on February 20, 2008. Retrieved July 26, 2012.
  6. "Pliny Fisk III & Gail Vittori". Texas Monthly . February 2008. Retrieved July 26, 2012.