Gail Vittori of Austin’s Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems on Green Building’s Roots and LEED for Health Care

	Gail Vittori is co-director of the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, a non-profit sustainable planning and design firm in Austin  established in 1975. Vittori is also co-director of the Green Guide for Health Care as well as chair of the USGBC’s LEED Application Guide for Healthcare committee.
		Interview by Eileen Schwartz. To hear the complete Q&A, click here

TXC: The CMPBS celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2005. Tell me about how the center has changed over the past several decades?

Vittori: The market has caught up to some of the early thinking that informed the founding of the center. It was not that long ago, but in 1975 the notions of green building and sustainability were really not talked about. Beginning to develop a framework about how buildings related to the environment and how could be viewed as part of the ecological system was relatively unique at the time. Thinking about buildings in an environmental way-- more than just energy-wise--in the 1970s was new information. The center, along with a few other non-profits around the world, was at the vanguard of what we now see playing out in a robust way in the marketplace under the rubric of green building.

TXC: In addition to offering LEED project management and master-planning services for green building, you also educate. Tell me about some of the tools you use to to do that with the commercial design and building community?

Vittori: LEED as a tool has been powerful and effective in bringing in the whole supply chain of entities--from contractors to designers--to have a common point of reference about how to begin to frame the opportunity that every project has to enhance the environmental and health performance of those jobs. 

TXC: The CMBPS served as the sustainability consultant to the architects on the new Dell Children's Medical Center of Central Texas project (see "Green Guidlines Take Root in Austin” in this issue) that is scheduled for completion soon and is seeking a platinum LEED certification.  Tell me about your role in that project.

Vittori: It was an opportunity to have a project in Austin that tapped into what was an expanding body of work we had undertaken at the center primarily focused around the Green Guide for Health Care. It was a good fit, having had the expertise in sustainable design, coupled with a focused evaluation of what the unique opportunities are in health care.

TXC: The Green Guide to Health Care?

Vittori: Our center was actually the convener of the Green Guide for Health Care going back to 2002. We were able to raise initial seed money to get it off the ground and then brought in the team of people who have really been at the forefront of developing the tools that now are looked at by the health-care sector as being the guide for how to begin to make this green approach workable in the health-care setting.

TXC: That program served as a pilot for the LEED health care guide?

Vitorri: Exactly. LEED was already on the market and familiar to many in the design and construction communities. So rather than starting with a different framework, we would build the tool using LEED. We had a collaborative relationship with the USGBC. We got their permission and basically adapted the existing LEED as the construction section for Green Guide for Health Care, making adaptations of existing LEED credits and adding new ones to respond to the unique characteristics of health care.

Now that LEED for Health Care is in development, and many people from the Green Guide for Health Care Steering Committee are also serving on the LEED for Health Care steering committee, we have been able to take advantage of the three-plus years of development on the Green Guide for Health Care and use that as a foundational reference document for LEED for Health Care, which we anticipate being launched some time this year.

TXC: Is it fair to say the green building movement got a jump start from the Central Texas sustainable building community?

Vittori: I'll tell you that in 1989 we were asked to develop ideas for the city of Austin, and what we put forward evolved into the city of Austin's green building program. That was the first green building program in the world. It is, in my mind, what put green building on the map as a policy framework tool that was in many ways the catalyst for the USGBC started in 1993. Austin laid the ground work for how you begin to think more comprehensibly about building, flows of resources, connecting to place. It is broadly recognized as the catalyst for what we see playing out now around the world.