Jacque Fresco

Introduction

Jacque Fresco (March 13, 1916 – May 18, 2017) was an American industrial designer, architectural designer, author and lecturer who called himself a "social engineer" and a futurist. He is best known for founding The Venus Project, a nonprofit organization based in Venus, Florida, that promotes a "resource-based economy" in which money, markets and national governments would be replaced by automated systems that allocate goods and services according to measured need and available resources.

It is important to state plainly what Fresco was not. He was not a psychologist, a psychiatrist or an academic scientist of any kind. He did not complete high school, he held no earned university degree, and the doctoral credentials he was sometimes introduced with on television have never been verified. Fresco nevertheless makes regular appearances in psychology reference works for two reasons: his proposals rest on sweeping psychological claims about how environment shapes human behavior, and for a period in the 1950s he operated a psychological consulting business in Miami that he closed after criticism from the American Psychological Association. He died at his home in Sebring, Florida, of complications of Parkinson's disease at the age of 101.

Early Life and Education

Fresco was born in New York City and grew up in a Sephardi Jewish household in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn. His father, Isaac, had emigrated from Constantinople, now Istanbul, around 1905 and worked as a horticulturist; his mother, Lena, came from Jerusalem. Fresco had an older sister, Freda, and a brother, David.

He came of age during the Great Depression. As a teenager he spent long hours with friends discussing Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein and the future of technology, and he briefly attended meetings of the Young Communist League before being expelled, by his own account, for loudly declaring that Marx was wrong. He left home at fourteen and spent a period hitchhiking and riding freight trains. There was no university education in the conventional sense; Fresco was self-taught, acquiring drafting, structural and design skills on the job. This biographical fact matters for evaluating his later work, because his authority rested entirely on a portfolio of designs, models and renderings rather than on peer-reviewed research or academic appointment.

Academic and Professional Career

Fresco had no academic career, and this distinguishes him from nearly every other figure in a psychology reference collection. His working life moved through a series of industrial and consulting posts.

In the late 1930s he worked for the Douglas Aircraft Company in California, where he proposed designs including a flying wing and a disc-shaped aircraft. Several of these ideas were judged impractical at the time and were not adopted; he resigned over design disagreements. In 1942 he was drafted into the United States Army and assigned technical design duties with the Army Air Forces at the Wright Field laboratories in Dayton, Ohio, where he produced a variable-camber wing intended to let a pilot alter wing thickness and lift in flight. He did not adapt to military life and was discharged.

In 1948 the electronics marketer Earl "Madman" Muntz commissioned Fresco to design low-cost housing. With associates Harry Giaretto and Eli Catran, Fresco designed and engineered the Trend Home, a house built largely of aluminum and glass that was displayed for three months on the Warner Bros. Sunset lot in Hollywood. Visitors toured it for a dollar, with proceeds going to the Cancer Prevention Society. The project never reached mass production; according to Muntz, federal housing officials proposed administrative requirements that would have destroyed the cost advantage. Fresco drew a lasting conclusion from the episode, namely that his inventions could not fulfill their potential without a change in the social system that funded them.

In the late 1940s Fresco founded and directed Scientific Research Laboratories in Los Angeles, lecturing and teaching technical design while working as a freelance inventor and scientific consultant. Funding was a persistent struggle. In 1955 he left California after his laboratory was cleared to make way for the Golden State Freeway and moved to Miami. There he opened a business as a psychological consultant despite having no formal training in the subject, and he closed it after what has been described as a barrage of criticism from the American Psychological Association. In Miami he also presented designs for circular cities and earned a living as an industrial designer for clients including Alcoa and the Major Realty Corporation. In 1961, with the architect Pietro Belluschi and C. Frederick Wise, he collaborated on the Sandwich House, a prefabricated aluminum house offered at roughly 2,950 dollars, or 7,500 dollars with foundation and interior fittings.

Between 1955 and 1969 Fresco called his social program Project Americana. In 1970 he formed an organization he named Sociocyberneering, Inc., built around the idea of joining technology to energy conservation, and promoted it through university lectures, radio and television appearances. He and his partner Roxanne Meadows eventually bought 21 acres of farmland in Venus, Florida, and began building the domed structures that still stand on the site. Fresco established a research center there in 1980 and named the enterprise The Venus Project after the town; the organization is generally dated to 1985, although accounts of its origins vary and some place the beginnings of the work in the mid-1970s.

The last two decades of his life brought him a much wider audience. William Gazecki's documentary Future by Design profiled him in 2006. In 2008 Peter Joseph featured him in Zeitgeist: Addendum, and Fresco appeared again in Zeitgeist: Moving Forward in 2011; Joseph's Zeitgeist Movement carried Fresco's ideas to a global audience before the two parted ways in 2011 over differences about goals and tactics. Fresco and Meadows traveled through roughly twenty countries in 2010 to promote the project. In July 2016 he received a Novus Summit award for city design and community, an award program supported by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs.

Major Contributions to Psychology

A psychological premise: environment, not free will

Fresco's proposals are built on a claim about human nature rather than on a technical demonstration. He argued that conduct is overwhelmingly shaped by genetic endowment and by the environment in which a person is raised, and he was skeptical that people choose their values freely. If behavior is a product of conditions, he reasoned, then the way to change crime, greed, prejudice or violence is to redesign the conditions rather than to exhort individuals. This environmental determinism is the hinge of his entire program, and it is why his work is discussed alongside behavioral and social psychology even though he produced no psychological research. Critics from humanistic and psychodynamic traditions dispute the premise, arguing that it underestimates agency, meaning-making and the interior life.

Fresco used the term social engineering deliberately, describing an approach in which cities, transport systems, education and production would be arranged so that cooperative behavior is the easiest and most rewarding option. In this respect his thinking resembles the planned-environment tradition that runs through utopian design and through behavioral engineering, and it invites the same objections: the designer's values are embedded in the plan, and the question of who decides what counts as desirable behavior is never fully settled.

The resource-based economy

The core economic proposal holds that the Earth's resources should be declared the common heritage of all people and managed by survey and computation rather than by price. In Fresco's account, sensors and central computers would track reserves, production capacity and demand, and would direct manufacturing accordingly, with money phased out altogether. He maintained that most criminal and antisocial behavior has material roots in scarcity and insecurity, and that removing scarcity would remove much of the motive for it. He was explicit that this vision belongs to no existing political tradition, writing that the aims of the project have no parallel with communism, socialism, fascism or any other ideology because the cybernetic technology that makes them conceivable is of recent origin.

City design and cybernation

Fresco produced several thousand drawings, models and computer renderings, many made with the animator Doug Drexler. His preferred form was the circular city: concentric rings of agriculture, residence, industry and transport arranged around a central dome housing computing and coordination functions, powered by renewable energy and largely automated. He called the union of automation and cybernetic coordination "cybernation" and expected it to shrink necessary labor drastically and eliminate the need for most routine decision-making.

Major Publications

Looking Forward (1969), written with Ken Keyes Jr., a speculative portrait of a cybernetic society in which want has been abolished and work and personal possessions no longer exist.
Introduction to Sociocyberneering (1977), a short statement of his social program.
The Venus Project: The Redesign of Culture (1995), the fullest early account of the project's aims and designs.
The Best That Money Can't Buy: Beyond Politics, Poverty and War (2002), his principal book and the most detailed exposition of the resource-based economy.
Designing the Future (2007), an illustrated overview of the project's plans and city designs.

Impact and Legacy

Fresco's influence has been cultural and architectural rather than scientific. His designs reached millions through the Zeitgeist films and through online circulation, and he is regularly cited by architects, planners and designers interested in sustainable cities. The physicist Paul G. Hewitt credited him with inspiring a career in physical science, and the synergetics theorist Arthur Coulter described his city designs as organic and evolutionary rather than revolutionary, casting them as an answer to Walter B. Cannon's idea of social homeostasis. Writing for the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies, Nikolina Olsen-Rule defended the project against the charge of naive utopianism, arguing that behind the sweeping promise there are scientifically grounded arguments that open up new possibilities.

The criticisms are substantial, and several of them are psychological or institutional rather than merely technical. The most frequently repeated is that almost none of it was built. William Gazecki, who made the sympathetic documentary Future by Design, identified the missing element as professional engagement: people ask to see an office building, a factory or a circular city, and there are none to show, because Fresco was not a collaborator and never worked within the professional structures that turn designs into buildings. The curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist wrote that Fresco's writings have been criticized for fascistic undertones of order and similitude while conceding that his ecological concepts continue to influence progressive architects and planners. Economists in the Austrian tradition, notably Robert P. Murphy, argue that the resource-based economy runs directly into the calculation problem: without prices there is no way to know the relative scarcity or desirability of resources, so the central plan has no rational basis for choosing between alternatives. Activists within the Zeitgeist Movement itself accused the project of an authoritarian, top-down structure in which Fresco made the final decisions, which they considered incompatible with the cooperative values it proclaimed. Socialist critics have objected that his cybernated system would remove the need for democratic responsibility, since in his schema decisions are made by the system rather than by people.

The most serious charge concerns credentials. Fresco was introduced as "Doctor" on the Larry King program and on one occasion claimed a doctorate in ergonomics; no evidence for either has been produced, and a degree from Sierra University that he cited in a contemporary newspaper article remains unverified. The related episode in Miami, where he practiced as a psychological consultant without formal training until the American Psychological Association objected, is the clearest instance of the pattern. Fresco's own answer to why his ideas were never realized was that he could not get to anybody, a response that located the obstacle in the resistance of institutions rather than in the feasibility of the designs.