Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems

In 2012, the Seaholm District was selected as one of ten projects in North America to participate in EcoDistricts’1 Pilot Program. To further advance this work, the City of Austin’s Office of Sustainability contracted the Center to engage with diverse public, private, and non-profit sector stakeholders with an objective to identify quantitative and qualitative opportunities and benefits, articulate the project’s sustainability vision, goals, and process, develop an action agenda, and explore how emerging tools such as ecoBalance and Visible Green can add value to the EcoDistrict framework.

Unlike most solar decathlon efforts, our work with Texas A&M Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Planning proved to have a degree of relevancy on almost all fronts — from material life cycles to our most recent work using life cycle phases as events that lead the user through everyday rituals of completing resource flows into regenerative environments.

The Center teamed with the University of Texas School of Architecture to participate in the first U.S. Department of Energy-sponsored Solar Decathlon. The event features 10 contests that measure the energy, water, transportation, environmental quality, market appeal, and livability performance of each team's entry. Designed by the student-faculty team to function entirely off-grid for energy and water, the competition spans 10-days following a 6 day period to construct the buildings on the Washington, DC mall.

Located in the Winter Garden region of South Texas, the Center was engaged by the Community Services Agency of Dimmit, LaSalle and Maverick Counties to establish a caliche block production operation, with a passive solar Girl Scouts Headquarters becoming the community demonstration opportunity for these low embodied energy, locally manufactured block offering local employment and energy efficient affordable housing opportunities.

A home for abused, neglected, abandoned and troubled children located in Ingram, Texas, the Hill Country Youth Ranch engaged the Center to provide ecological land planning services along with design and engineering of one of the first residential lodges for the Ranch’s children.

Verano is a planned community utilizing the SmartCode, LEED for New Development, and the Congress for New Urbanism’s approach to transects. As we looked at the lists of procedures, we realized that the very concept of life regenerating itself was not possible; the cycles were not there. We intervened by deciding to take what is required by the SmartCode and LEED into a cyclical rather than a linear list.

A small town in South Texas had its gas cut-off in the winter of 1977 due to a contract dispute with the town’s monopoly gas supplier, leaving the 8,100 residents without heat and hot water. Posing an immediate health risk, the Zavala County Community Development Corporation contacted the Center to assist in an emergency response capacity.

When Dell Children’s Medical Center broke ground on the Robert Mueller Development site in 2004, the Seton Family of Hospitals had a vision of creating a “green” hospital which would set new standards. Over the last several years, world-renowned medical professionals, architects, environmentalists and elected officials have toured Dell Children’s to learn what it takes to build and operate a LEED certified hospital.

Dell Children's is the first hospital in the world to achieve LEED® Platinum Certification.

Stratus Properties’ Block 21, a $300 million, 1.1 million square foot mixed use development in Austin’s Central Business District created a distinct opportunity to explore green design and construction on a massive scale.  With Andersson-Wise leading the architectural team, the 37 story project will feature an entire city block of mixed-use development including the W Hotel & Residences (159 condominiums and 252 guestrooms), the 2,500-capacity Austin City Limits music venue and studio, as well as retail and meeting space, a spa, bars and restaurants, and thousands of square feet of offi

The Island Nations Initiative is a housing system that functions as a home-building kit that unskilled labor can construct and withstands hurricane and earthquake conditions due to the carefully predesigned and pre–engineered components. The "Village in a Box" [VIB] GroForm Building Kit can serve both humanitarian needs and the ecotourism industry with the potential for the later to aid in partially supporting the former if  relief agencies are not available or unable to function.