Paying It Forward: Lessons from the Margins

Pliny Fisk III passed on July 27th, 2026.

Well, now, Pliny. You headed out into the bardo a week ago. And so we’re mourning while celebrating a life lived to the hilt: no opportunity missed to thumb one's nose at the systems of extractive foolishness, and to declare, with full clarity, hilarity and resolve, that cleverer ways are possible. Surely every living moment presents a window of opportunity for integration, layering, synergistic alignment?

Thanks for insisting I read Margulis and Alexander and Prigonine, for teaching me how to stick weld, for biking in the cool of the morning through deep East Austin. Thank you for arguing with me and making me feel crazy and then finding wilder resolutions than we knew were possible. You weren't ever the kind of mentor who checked in on my life or career. Instead, we became friends in the work. Thank you for calling me at random, over the years and then decades, with enthusiastic schemes for transforming industry and turning society inside out with basic common sense. What could be more dangerous?

In recent weeks, we spoke of you so often. You’re one of Spherical's beloved transcalar elders. We’ve had so much to show you. We think you'd like it.

Obviously, many of us will be writing your legacy into the annals of practice: of green building and landscape architecture, of circular economics and industrial ecologies.

But some of us camped out for a time under the sun to learn from you and Gail. Some like me stayed on for a year or more, part of a secret cohort of nerds and fabricators and practical dreamers. For fifty years we showed up for this shared wild experiment. It’s on us to carry it forth.

Thank you for teaching me never to settle. Aren’t we here after all to maximize potential? Thank you for dreaming madly, and always saving enough energy for the dancing to come.

In the last summer of the twentieth century, I headed down to Austin and moved into a trailer parked by an experimental cement factory. The trailer was silver with an Avion badge, and shaded by a corrugated metal porch heavy with hot pink trumpet vines. Inside, a small kitchen counter had been fashioned out of a Peugeot’s steel trunk. The floorboards were softening from water leaks and age. I'd been casually warned that someone had woken up there to a rattlesnake wrapped around the fan, trying to sleep cool in the intern housing. Tucked against the wall on a narrow mattress, I ran the fan and put the snake out of my mind.

Our project that summer was to prototype modular steel flexible building systems. A grant from the U.S. Department of Energy was covering some of the cost. The crew included a rotating cast of other interns, mostly Americans studying design or engineering from the Midwest or East Coast. Starting early in the cooler temperatures of the morning, we screwed huge, hand-welded anchors into heavy clay soil. The anchors were placed at each corner of the building, eliminating the need for a poured foundation. Each part of the frame was built upward from there and bolted together like a jungle gym, which would allow different elements to change or move over time. We perched on ladders with socket wrenches, feeling for the correct soft-tightness. I cut stacks of powder-coated Unistrut steel on a chop saw, sparks whining off the blade, and then hand-filed the raw edges down. We hand-assembled structural insulation panels, and picked old nails out of reclaimed boards of longleaf pine. Some days, I ended up with sneakers pocked from stick-welding spray, and skin UV-sunburned from the torch.

It was hot for a Canadian like myself. Too hot for morning coffee, too hot for working in late afternoon. Some days spiked to 114° F. Summer grasses in a field adjacent to the trailer grew so far above our heads that we tunneled through them to the buildings. The rains that arrived felt legendary, the ground underfoot becoming sodden and full. I learned about flash floods, but also about the ways that one might, in a single season, catch a household’s share of rain.

It's strange fortune that I ended up in Austin at all. While the American economy was peaking on optimistic, late-90s globalism, I’d been studying industrial design up in Rhode Island. I was certain that a kind of common sense could be introduced into the way materials flowed into logistics and manufactured products, and that the insanity of consumer waste could be circumvented through clever design. This wasn’t a fashionable concern. I thought a lot about how objects might be intentionally reconfigured to adapt, change, last, or rot. I was half-mad with these thoughts, in fact, since the craft I was learning was also so hitched to extraction. There is something perverse about immersing yourself in a practice specifically to reimagine it. I crafted digital models to simulate plastic injection moulding, and felt myself accelerating toward an existential dead end. For anyone working in design, alternative thinking can be hard to come by. 

One late winter evening during this time, Pliny Fisk came to speak at my design school. I was stuck in traffic, caravanning back from an IKEA in New Jersey. My studio class had spent the day examining furniture, flipping pieces over to reveal their false fronts and discern the designers’ sleights of hand. We marveled at the ingenious flat-packing. But on the way back I was sweating, hoping to make it to the architecture department in time for the end of the talk. It was raining when we got to Providence, the sun already down.

A sympathetic professor directed me to the restaurant where Pliny was now holding forth from the middle of a long table of graduate students. I’d already sent along an earnest job application to work for his design non-profit, so I was embarrassed to have missed the lecture. My waterproof anorak was dripping all over the restaurant floor. But Pliny shuffled the older students aside and invited me to sit across from him, while he interviewed me over dinner. He took in questions from the table and then quizzed me, testing: Was I familiar with phytoremediation? What about the role of water in settlement, or the entanglement of architecture with its surrounding landscapes? He warned me that he drove very fast. The Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, which he co-directed down in Austin, thrived on radical design experiments, and comfort was not on offer.

That June, Pliny picked me up at the Austin airport. He drove the car, as promised, at rocket speed. We arrived at a property on the edge of the city’s eastern limit. His co-director and wife Gail Vittori was away that year on a fellowship at Harvard, and few others had arrived for the summer. I’d had an oddly specific dream that spring, of a silver trailer overgrown with brush. And so, when Pliny pointed one out on my tour of the Center, I moved in. I had a couple of bags and sketchbooks, a few mixtapes on cassette.

The East side of Austin was connected to the rest of the city by fast-moving roads bordered by drainage ditches. People would walk those ditches to catch the buses into town. Beginning in the late 1920s, city planners had begun relocating Austin’s Black community to the East of downtown. Interstate 35 was later built as a physical barrier that reinforced the division; the lines of the landscape were literally drawn on race and class in a way that was well-known to planners and certainly to the people who lived under the thumb of such decisions, but they were new to me. 

Design can give new physical form to an idea, but the Center worked to enact entirely different ways of thinking. The prototypes we built were artifacts of an integrative process that also, at times, gave communities a contributing voice. The maps showed places, but also delineated spatial flows and nested scales of ecologies and geologies. A region’s unique qualities shaped its “metabolic function”—maps were overlaid to show energy, water, and material systems to guide economic decisions and community designs. 

In a room framed out with welded rebar, Center architect Richard MacMath taught us about the emerging concepts of carbon sequestration and how to apply it to architectural practice. I imagined atoms of carbon held down to Earth in buildings rather than floating upward into the atmosphere. I flipped through thick-bound documents outlining the consulting work the Center had done for greening the Pentagon’s vast structure. Standard design practice under extractive capitalism was eviscerating uniqueness. Places and materials were made to seem generic for easier exchange. Though, at the time, the Center’s offices were ragged around the edges, their work was aimed straight at the heart of American policy and enterprise. 

Pliny would occasionally hand us books. Christopher Alexander’s conceptual maps of thought, Lynn Margulis’ evolution of planetary ecology. He introduced me to Ilya Prigogine’s islands of coherence, though he was suspicious of Prigogine's soft hands, which had "clearly never seen a day of work." I read Ian McHarg, Pliny's teacher, who had developed techniques for visualizing land through layers of data. The Center drew in a relentless stream of emerging ideas and writing. Yet it operated more in the spirit of Buckminster Fuller's assertion that "philosophy to be effective must be mechanically applied." Books were therefore well-worn, filled with post-its and sawdust, tools for thinking.

The work we do in our lifetimes is bound to worldviews and systems of understanding. I had grown up seeing Canadian forests cleared for timber, leaving simplified landscapes hot and bare. As I grew older, in my mind’s eye, I began to see every material thing that moved through the economy in terms of entropic forces: clearcuts, monocultures and open mines. One cultural story over the last decades has been that the ongoing damage to planetary life has been unfortunate but manageable. A cost of doing business, where the appropriate response is to simply minimize harm where possible. 

But harm reduction wasn’t the story that Gail and Pliny were holding for us. They held up a lens through which human activity might be seen in an evolutionary partnership with life. What were we even doing out there in Texas? We were refining our ability to perceive interconnected systems, to design for restraint and care, as active participants of the living world. The number and density of trees on the land surrounding us was estimated in accordance with the amount of oxygen they would release back into the atmosphere. This was relevant to a community design, I was told. How many humans might that oxygen sustain? What were the local patterns of material flows, of energy, and of sunlight? Which trees, which plants? What, then, is an invasive species on a living planet? Might the fly ash, a waste byproduct of the coal industry, tested in the concrete factory next to my trailer, be similar—an orphaned entity that hadn’t yet found its honored place?

Questions become constraints, and constraints become creative partners. We sliced and bolted steel with the intention that every building was known to be temporary, no matter how long it lasted. Its materials were honored and cut in such a way as to maintain their value in the geologic flow of time. My time in Austin that summer forever realigned my thinking.

Ten years later I traveled to Boston. The winter city was freezing, and I pushed through the wind in my corporate drag, a silk blouse and heels. I was working in San Francisco on 3D software for architects and engineers, embedded in a corporation’s new sustainability initiative. My collaborators were software developers whose clever physics models of buildings and manufacturing processes promised to eliminate wasted energy and carbon.

Knowing how deeply habits of thought are embedded in technologies, I got up every day and play-acted as a corporate being, working to smuggle in the patterns I’d first encountered in Austin: energy performance calculations and carbon sequestration and material strength and life cycles. Sustainability had surged into the corporate sector, and that wave had picked me up and dropped me into Boston for the Greenbuild conference. There were thousands of people there. In a dark, carpeted hall, a mainstage plenary started with a film about the Center. The fabrication shop was projected on an enormous screen, the same one where I had first worked. Gail and Pliny were each projected 20 feet tall. This celebratory moment was suffused with a dynamic tension. The Center had been working for decades to align human activities with the creative organizing force of life. Thousands of professionals in that room wanted to be part of this. But they were all—we were all—resisting the juggernaut of economic extraction. That huge conference room was a temporary reprieve.

My corporate gig had no hierarchical power. Nearly every day I encountered colleagues who wanted to participate in projects that promised to harmonize with life on Earth. They would find time to drink coffee with me and dream into potentials—imagining, for instance, how we might help millions of engineers track the ecological lifecycle of materials. The only real power in these conversations was to source from a deep stream of latent will. Because of the juggernaut, managers resisted it. Industry associations pushed back. Quarterly financial targets undermined it. Over years, many gains were chipped away. But if there’s a potential to contribute to a new system, folks will make space. Given the opportunity to work on healing systems, people of all disciplines will seize it.  

Years later, when my partner David and I started up a studio ourselves, we didn’t have a business plan. What we had, mostly, was a shared view that the restorative work of healing places was possible, contingent upon a decisive shift in perspective, to see ourselves as entangled within the life-web. We are a hinge generation. The children of the 1970s, the students of fortunate visionaries that came up at that time. We can't ever replicate the circumstances that were transformative to us, but we carry forward responsibility. The restraints on our younger collaborators are mighty. In the years since I turned up at the Center, economics have tightened around them. There is less flexibility of movement through space, less access to cheap housing. There are fewer opportunities to experiment, to have a bit of elbow room to learn to weld, to learn to build, to have the privilege of screwing up. Tolerances are tighter, affordances fewer. I think often about how to create space for people to evolve together while learning from the experiments that preceded us.

We now work out of smaller spaces, and our studio team is spread out across the continent, beaming in over screens. We, too, use maps and technology to help shift the perception of land and place. But while the urgency is now much clearer, we find our way in the margins, adjacent to industries but apart from them, in the spaces between. 

24 years after I went down to Austin, Pliny came to the Bay Area to do a talk, and he stayed with us. He slept in our trailer, and walked around our small garden in the morning, checking out the bees and the tiny greywater system. He was more gentle and pensive than I’d remembered, and we talked for many hours.

How do we hold both the dream of transformation and the reality of constraint? How do we pay forward not just technical knowledge, but the capacity to see systems, to keep thinking, and to experiment with integrity, even when the margins are what remain? As centralized systems are dismantled, it may be that the work before us once again involves supporting radical actors doing things independently in their communities, creating kits of parts for mutual aid. Seeing me starting to give up on a problem, Pliny would often interject: "Keep thinking," he would say to me, "Don't ever stop thinking."

Excerpted from MAX POT The Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems: 50 Years of Serious Commotion, 2025.

All photos 1999-2025 by Dawn Danby, Spherical. More on Flickr.