Pliny Fisk III, is co-founder of the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems (CMPBS) in Austin, Texas and an expert in the field of sustainability. Fisk has held faculty positions throughout the U.S. at institutions including the University of New Mexico; the University of Oklahoma, where he held the Bruce Goff Chair for Creative Architecture; Mississippi State University, as the Herrin Distinguished Fellow; and most recently, the University of Texas-Austin.
In 1975, while serving as assistant professor at the University of Texas' School of Architecture, Fisk co-founded the CMPBS, an independent non-profit research and educational firm that concentrates on the interrelationships between the built and natural environments with a focus on sustainable community and local economic development.
The center's broad agenda includes work and research in the areas of environmental planning and policy, environmental hazards, sustainable community planning in underrepresented communities, environmental justice, green architecture and construction, sustainability theory, materials science, life cycle assessment, building systems, and patent and product development.
With CMPBS, Fisk has received several national and international awards including the United Nations' Earth Summit Award, presented in 1992 at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro. The award recognized the center's work with the city of Austin in creating the world's first Green Builder Program. He has received the American Solar Energy Society's 2000 Passive Solar Pioneer Award, the first Sacred Tree Award for "significant contributions to the advancement and transformation of green buildings in the public sector" from the U.S. Green Building Council in 2002, and the Presidential Team Award for contributing to the plan for moving towns relocated by the Mississippi Flood.
Fisk's work has been widely published and was featured in the Contemporary American Architects Vol. IV by Tashcen Press. The book, published in Germany in 1998, represented the international work from 12 U.S. firms.
Pliny studied at the University of Pennsylvania, earning bachelor's and master's degrees in architecture and a master of landscape architecture. His close association during his graduate studies with environmental planning pioneer Ian McHarg guided him to concentrate on ecological land planning. In addition to his degrees, Fisk holds certificates for his studies in systems sciences and permaculture.
"Of all the environmental designers who studied at the feet of Ian McHarg," wrote J. William Thompson, a fellow in the American Society of Landscape Architects and editor of Landscape Architecture Magazine, "Pliny Fisk is probably the most eclectic, the most radical, and the most inventive. He is also, arguably, the one whose ideas have the widest practical application to the sustainable practice of landscape design."