Jacques Fresco

Jacque Fresco is an industrial designer, author, lecturer, futurist, inventor, and a pioneer in the field of human factors engineering, based in Venus, Florida, USA. Fresco has worked as both designer and inventor in a wide range of fields spanning from biomedical innovations to totally integrated social systems. He believes his ideas would maximally benefit the greatest number of people and he states some of his ideas stem from his formative years during the Great Depression. In the mid-1970s, he started The Venus Project and the non-profit organization Future by Design together with Roxanne Meadows, that reflects the culmination of Fresco’s life work. To this day he writes and lectures extensively on subjects ranging from the holistic Design of sustainable cities, energy efficiency, natural resource management and advanced automation, focusing on the benefits it will bring to society.

Earlier work

Automated construction

Born on March 13, 1916, Jacque Fresco started his professional career as Design consultant for Rotor Craft Helicopter Company. He served in the Army design and Development Unit at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, U.S. and worked for the Raymond De-Icer Corporation based in Los Angeles, California, U.S., as research engineer.

He worked for many companies and in many fields such as technical consultant and technical advisor to the Motion Picture Industry, industrial Design instructor at the Art Center School in Hollywood, California. In Los Angeles, he was colleague and work associate of psychologist Donald Powell Wilson.

In 1942, Fresco started the Revell Plastics Company (now Revell-Monogram) with Lou Glaser, although he later left to pursue his other ideas, working variously in aerospace research and development, architecture, efficient automobile Design, bare-eye 3D cinematic projection methods and medical equipment design where he developed a three dimensional X-ray unit amongst other things.

Jacque lives in Florida on a 21-acre (85,000 m²) property populated with various domed buildings of his Design along with his assistant, Roxanne Meadows, where they work on books and film to demonstrate their concepts and ideas.

Resource-based economy

Circular city

A major theme of Fresco's is the concept of a resource-based economy that replaces the need for the scarcity-oriented monetary economy we have now. Fresco argues that the world is rich in natural resources and energy and that — with modern technology and judicious efficiency — the needs of the global population can be met with abundance, while at the same time removing the current limitations of what is deemed possible due to notions of economic viability.

He gives this example to help explain the idea:

"At the beginning of World War II the U.S. had a mere 600 or so first-class fighting aircraft. We rapidly overcame this short supply by turning out more than 90,000 planes a year. The question at the start of World war II was: Do we have enough funds to produce the required implements of war? The answer was No, we did not have enough money, nor did we have enough gold; but we did have more than enough resources. It was the available resources that enabled the US to achieve the high production and efficiency required to win the war. Unfortunately this is only considered in times of war."

Fresco states that for this to work, all of the Earth's resources must be held as the common heritage of all people and not just a select few; and the practice of rationing resources through monetary methods is irrelevant and counter-productive to our survival.