Eshan Maitra
Imagining about any other 100-year-old grandpa, we would picture some ancient person of interests and stories about good ol’ times. But not Jacque Fresco. He is one of the fortunate man and the genius who lives in the future. He has made over 5,500 technical futuristic architectural sketches in the past 40 years.
Way out to the south-central Florida with little cell phone service, there lies a utopian compound created by this 100-year-old futurist, Venus Project Research Center. An ideal society built in his own model of imagination. There, he lives among the lush tropical trees around cluster of white dome-like structures.
Caroline Winter writes in Bloomberg, “Fresco, now hard of hearing, gave me a nod when I visited in March. “Thank you for driving all this way,” said Roxanne Meadows, 67, a former portrait artist and Fresco’s longtime girlfriend and collaborator. A dozen people had turned out that day to see the secluded 21-acre property, including Venus Project devotees from as far away as Australia.” Just few days’ earlier Fresco had his 100th birthday bash at a convention center in Fort Myers. That drew more than 600 fans.
Roxanne Meadows mentions that, “Fresco says, rounded structures are more efficient and better protected against natural disasters.” They believe, this rounded retro structures in the wilds of Florida hints a master plan for a City of the Future without money. Fresco talks about his vision that, this city will not be run by politicians, rather by a central computer. Every possible needs will be distributed by technologies. He states that, “A machine doesn’t have emotions. It’s not susceptible to corruption.” He mentions that, social engineering and favorable living circumstances will ensure responsible public relationship toward each other.
Fresco was born in Brooklyn in 1916. He is a self-taught inventor and futurists. Through his life, he has always been a free-spirited visionary. But his imaginative lifestyle gave him much struggles in the early years. Fresco dropped out of school at age 13 and hitchhiked across America. Luckily, a temporary job of drafting designs for an aircraft company made him find his passion. He dreamt up novel technologies and infrastructure such oval-shaped driverless cars and floating cities. Many of these displayed at the Research Center.
The compound itself represents what the outskirts of a city built in the image of the Venus Project might look like. Meadows says, “We didn’t build what we wanted to build, we built what we could afford to build.” She gives tours of the grounds. Interestingly, this was actually a tomato farm that Fresco purchased in 1979. About the same time the couple met and started working on building examples of mass-producible housing. Together they planted hundreds of trees and dredged the land.
The most extraordinary thing was that it was mostly financed with the money they scraped together doing various odd jobs. Doing freelancing as model builders for architecture firms and medical equipment companies. Meadow mentions, “We labored in obscurity for a long time.” Now when visitors come paying $200 per family for tours every Saturday, they are left with awe.
Fresco firmly believes, we already have the technologies to build up such futuristic city life. The only lacking there is the will to change. He thinks there will be revolution urging for Venus Project. He even joked that, “There will be a lot of people getting shot, including me. I’m surprised I haven’t been shot already.”