Mr. Fisk Builds His Green House

THIS election year is full of pronouncements about the futur'. But perhaps none is as startling as the architectural apparition now rising amid the prickly pear on a scraggly stretch of land outside Austin. It is here that Pliny Fisk 3d -- ecologist, designer and professional renegade -- is building his experimental Advanced Green Builder Demonstration house, a brave strange-looking leap into the eco-future.

Huge silver cisterns stand heroically at the entrance and glint in the sun. "How do you hide the 13,000 gallons of rainwater a month the average family needs to survive a drought in this climate?" Mr. Fisk mused.

You don't.

For the last 20 years, Mr. Fisk, an architect and landscape architect (he holds master's degrees in both), has been running his nonprofit Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems here, a sort of Ice Station Zebra for ecological research and design. The 2,000-square-foot, $250,000 demonstration house, which will be open to the public when -- and if -- it is finished this year, is conceived as a sort of model home for environmentally committed Mr. and Ms. Blandings of the future. They will use energy-efficient appliances and low-flush composting toilets and will have no problem gardening with waste water. Their house will rely on and commune with nature's own resources and rhythms. Photovoltaic roof panels will capture energy from the sun and transform it into electricity; rain is to be the family's only source of water.

Part futuristic, part primitive -- Mr. Fisk gamely calls it "the esthetics of the unfinished" -- the structure brings together much of the center's thinking under one impossible-to-miss roof.

Once considered on the fringe, the center, which Mr. Fisk, 51, co-directs with his wife, Gail Vittori, 41, a former head of the Austin's Solid Waste Advisory Commission, is now widely considered to be in the vanguard of the country's eco-friendly or "green building" movement. "He's given the whole movement a more technical bent and a less touchy-feely direction," said James White, an Environmental Protection Agency scientist.

Let other architects and builders throw around words like "green" and "sustainab ility" as a marketing tool. Mr. Fisk is trying to figure out what they actually mean. A man with photovoltaic energy who possesses some qualities of a mad scientist and obsessed inventor, he may be found huddled over a Crock-Pot or computer in his "earth lab," analyzing blocks of alternative building materials, some of them looking like dead ringers for shredded wheat.