Gail Vittori

Work

Since 1993, Vittori has coordinated the Center's Sustainable Design in Public Buildings Program, including serving as a sustainable design consultant for the Pentagon Renovation Program’s Commissioning Team from 1999 to 2006, numerous City of Austin design projects including Texas’s first public sector LEED certified building, the redevelopment of Austin's 709-acre (2.87 km²) former Robert Mueller Municipal Airport including piloting LEED for Neighborhood Development, the new Austin Federal Courthouse, and the first LEED-Platinum certified hospital in the world, Dell Children’s Medical Center of Central Texas.

Beginning in 2000, Vittori led several national initiatives focused on greening the health care sector and advancing environmental health considerations in green building. Examples include collaborating on the development of the American Society of Healthcare Engineering’s (ASHE) Green Healthcare Construction Guidance Statement, and the Green Guide for Health Care, convened by the Center in 2002, a project of CMPBS and Health Care Without Harm. She currently serves as a Co-Coordinator of the Green Guide for Health Care and is Founding Chair of the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED for Healthcare core committee (2004–2008). Vittori was the 2009 Chair of the U.S. Green Building Council’s Board of Directors. In 2009, Secretary Janet Napolitano appointed Vittori to the Department of Homeland Security’s Sustainability and Efficiency Task Force.

Vittori has spearheaded emerging green and affordable housing initiatives, tools and resources, including directing a Hands Across America program in 1989 that created a building materials exchange and cooperative homebuilding training program for colonias residents along the Texas Rio Grande Valley; consulting to the DC Housing Authority to establish a green materials library and assessment process; being invited to participate on the 5-person core development team of Enterprise Community Foundation’s Green Communities Initiative in 2004; and, in 2008, spearheading a successful initiative to develop green building criteria for the Texas-based Meadows Foundation capital grant funding.

In 1989, Vittori proposed a conceptual framework for what evolved as the City of Austin’s Green Building Program, the only U.S. program recognized at the 1992 U.N. Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, and the first green building program in the world. Along with Pliny Fisk, she oversaw the program’s early stage development through 1992. Austin’s Green Builder Program influenced the formation of the U.S. Green Building Council and LEED, in addition to scores of policies throughout the U.S. and abroad. Additionally, from 1988 to 1998, she served on the City’s Solid Waste Advisory Commission, six of those years as founding chair, a committee formed in response to a successful initiative co-coordinated by Vittori to cancel a proposed waste-to-energy municipal solid waste incinerator. Her work on establishing pay as you throw recycling residential programs, in addition to recycling programs for the City’s commercial and multi-family sectors, has led Austin to having one of the nation’s most successful recycling programs. Her work in this area continues with promoting zero waste by 2040, adopted by the Austin City Council in January 2009. Vittori is on the advisory boards of Natural Home magazine and Environmental Building News.

Books and selected media

Education and personal life

Vittori was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University Graduate School of Design from 1998 to 1999, and attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst where she studied economics. She is married to Pliny Fisk III and has two children.