Pliny Fisk III: Creating a Maximum Potential Future

Pliny Fisk III has long been recognized as a leader and one of a handful of original pioneers for what has become the green building/sustainable design and planning movement. Pliny is one of those rare visionaries considered eccentric just for being decades ahead of his time. He imagines a future yet to be realized and with tools such as his Lens protocols, he begins to chart a course of how we might get there. The biography titled Pliny Fisk III: Creating a Maximum Potential Future tells many tales of how the work of this remarkable innovator, inventor, and rabble-rouser influenced a generation of designers.

Author Sam Martin artfully combines specific details from the colorful life and storied career of Pliny with reflections from the man himself, weaving into the narrative an impressive cadre of his colleagues and cohorts through the years. Part mad scientist, part visionary, and always a roll up his sleeves and get things done man of the people, Pliny has become an icon of the green building movement. From prototype to podium, Pliny and his Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems have revolutionized the way we design for an ecologically inspired built environment.

This 320 page black and white book, enhanced by its contrasting vintage imagery and futuristic graphic concepts, is the first in a series of publications about GREEN MASTERS who have forged the cutting-edge of sustainable design.

Sam Martin is the director of digital strategy at Texas Monthly. Before joining that magazine, he was director of publishing at frog design, where he was in charge of the firm's global content strategy and the founding editor of the company's Design Mind magazine. Sam is the author of several books of non-fiction, including Manspace: A Primal Guide to Marking Your Territory and The Curious Boy's Book of Adventure. He was also the ghostwriter for Hartmut Esslinger's book A Fine Line: How Design Strategies are Shaping the Future of Business. He is a former senior editor at This Old House and Mother Earth News magazines, and was a contributing writer at The Austin Chronicle. Sam spent his younger years in London, England, before briefly living in Austin in the 1st and 2nd grades, and finally settling in Houston where he attended Lamar High School. He graduated with a BA in English from Baylor University in 1990. After his college years, which also included several semesters of French language and literature at the University of Texas, Sam traveled for several years in Europe, Central America, Fiji, Australia, Southeast Asia, Nepal, and Canada, where he planted 80,000 trees as part of a tree planting crew in northern British Columbia. Sam called New York home from 1998-2002 and won a silver medal from the Society of American Travel Writers for his contribution to Lonely Planet's 2004 USA guidebook (the Texas chapter). His public speaking appearances include Pecha Kucha Austin, The Thinking Digital Conference, and, in 2009, the TED Global Conference in Oxford, England. Sam's poetry has been published in Borderlands: A Texas Poetry Review and The Santa Barbara Review.