Thinking globally at Max's pot - bioregional building design

Whole Earth Review, Spring, 1989 by Pliny Fisk, III, Gail Vittori, Ray Reece

Max's Pot was established in 1975 by Pliny Fisk III and Daria Bolton Fisk. Unlike similar institutions that have failed, Max's Pot transcended being merely an apporpriate-tech demonstration center where visitors came to stare. Instead, the Center works directly with people on a variety of projects around the hemisphere. For more information and a list of publications, contact the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, 8604 F.M. 969 Austin, Texaz 787724; 512/928-4786

WE RUN A COMPANY IN AUSTIN, Texas called the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, Inc. Most of our friends and constituents know us as the Center, or the Pot, or Max's Pot. We live and work in a turn-of-the-century farmhouse atop a hill overlooking Austin. Surrounded by the illusory prosperity of high-tech industry, our hilltop perch serves as our proving ground, our home base - the place where we begin our process of seeing the possible from an oftentimes impossible array of resources, places, and people.

We started the Center 14 years ago, before we knew more than just a smidgen about such things as bioregions, biomes, and other elements of the bioregional movement. We defined ourselves then as appropriate technologists caught in a society that was driving the planet toward serious damage - perhaps toward extinction of life itself - from brute technologies and resource pillage as inappropriate as we could imagine. We still use the term "appropriate technology" to describe what we do, but now we use the context of the bioregion - its potentials and constraints - and the framework of sustainability as fundamental guideposts. An "appropriate technology," in our current lexicon, is a method of using the material resources of a bioregion - its water, its soil, its minerals, flora, and fauna - in such a manner as not to exceed that bioregion's carrying capacity, i.e. its ability to sustain its health and resource yield through natural means of growth and renewal.

Our commitment to this perspective has led Max's Pot to some interesting places in the past dozen years - like invited U.S. House and Senate sub-committee testimonies, plenary talks at national and international housing and energy conferences, university lectures and consultancies - and like solitary confinement in a jail cell in Crystal City, Texas. This is a south Texas farming town of 10,000 people, mostly poor and Mexican-American, to which we were beckoned in January of 1978. Two years earlier, a group of political reformers associated with La Raza Unida had been elected to the city government. They had stopped paying the better part of the city's natural gas bills to protest a tripling of rates for gas in violation of a multi-year contract. So, in the icy winter of 1977-78, the gas company terminated service to the town and provoked a public health emergency. After vain appeals for help from the federal government - help denied by the intervention of a Texas governor who considered La Raza a pack of socialist revolutionaries - the city leaders contacted us through mutual friends, and off we went in a wheezing old VW microtruck.

We stayed in Crystal City for several months, plying our craft as appropriate technologists while seeking ways to nudge the city toward self-reliance and economic autonomy. We built a factory able to produce five solar water heaters a day with a crew of five. We coordinated the installation of over 800 woodburning stoves, some of which were joined functionally to the hot water systems. We established a credible cottage industry based on the collection and distribution of local mesquite wood. We financed these and other initiatives with modest grants from the Community Services Agency and Department of Energy, followed by a more substantial sum from the National Center for Appropriate Technology, and, all along, supplements from our own scant resources.

When we left Crystal City in the early summer of 1980, we were hailed as semi-heroes of Technology for the People. But when we went back a couple of years later to retrieve some equipment - our equipment - from a Crystal City warehouse, the Center's director was arrested and jailed for larceny theft. We hadn't sufficiently accounted, we learned, for the frontier subtleties of south Texas politics. Our former patrons in La Raza Unida had been hounded out of office, and their successors had branded the Center as part of the short-lived socialist insurrection. After three days in solitary, the charges were dropped as unceremoniously as they had been levied. (Meanwhile, after ten years of use, about a third of our $150 solar water heaters are still performing in Crystal City, according to a study by a Baylor University graduate student.)

Despite this ambiguous epilogue, the winter we spent in the jaws of crisis at Crystal City was one of the most formative experiences in the history of the Center. In those few months of system design and hands-on labor, of training workers and dodging flak from government heavies, we were able to test and refine a cosmos of theories that we had evolved as planning students under lan McHarg and later as faculty in the School of Architecture at the University of Texas (from which Pliny Fisk was proud to resign in the heat of that freezing south Texas winter).