When I was researching Architecture, I simply researched “Learning Architecture from scratch” and “Principles of Architecture” on Google. What was surprising is that I have found articles and blogs on a futurist and an architect called Jacque Fresco on the first page for both keywords on Google. I thought that definitely this guy has to be a big deal. Fresco turned out to be a very inspiring futurist architect that every architect and designer should know about. When I researched him more, I found a documentary made by William Gazecki that surveys his design work available on Netflix.
The documentary is one of the most inspiring documentaries I have seen about futuristic design. The documentary involves thoughts about designing the future culture and society in architecture and other fields like products, landscape architecture, and urban design. The documentary surveys the idea of social engineering and the design work of the famous designer and architect, Jacque Fresco. Social engineering is re-designing the future to comply with people’s problems.
Jacque Fresco is considered by many to be a modern day Da Vinci. Peer to Einstein and Buckminster Fuller, Jacque is a self-taught futurist, structural designer, architectural designer, concept artist, and educator who describe himself most often as a student of many inter-related fields. He is a prolific inventor, having spent his entire life conceiving of and devising inventions on various scales which entail the use of innovative technology. As a futurist, Jacque is not only a conceptualist and a theoretician, but he is also an engineer and a designer. Fresco writes and lectures his views concerning sustainable cities, energy, efficiency, natural-resource management, cybernetic technology, advanced automation, and the role of science in society. With his colleague, Roxanne Meadows, he is the founder and director of The Venus Project. According to Fresco, his city designs are aimed to improve daily life and improve the standards of living for everyone. His proposal is for a worldwide system of resource control based on a science approach.
One of the most inspiring architecture projects Fresco has designed was The Trend Home. It is a basic regular home that is built mostly of aluminum and glass. The design was inspired by his surrounding environment of the depression. He was commissioned to design a form of housing under the conditions that it be low cost, composed of available materials at that time, and be functional. It took 10 men eight hours to construct the Trend Home and it was a big deal on TV and in the architecture industry at that time. It was designed for rapid mass production.
Jacque Fresco is not the only architect or designer who thought about redesigning the culture or predicting the future design. There are some other futurist architects who contributed to the futurism movement like Antonio Sant’Elia, Tadao Ando, Wayne McAllister, Eero Saarinen, Cesar Pelli, Michael Graves and Angiolo Mazzoni.
A futurist is any artist, scientist, engineer, or sociologist who thought and worked on how tomorrow could look like. Like Fresco, futurists work on plans to build a whole new form that would be beneficial or trendy in the future.
I know that my first milestone could be felt that it is only about Jacque Fresco. But I feel that in order to understand a new subject to me like futuristic architecture, I had to breakdown the subject into examples so I can learn from them. Jacque Fresco was an example of what I want to do later in my career, so I had to study him a little more. In the next blog I am intending to research the concept of futurist architecture itself and what it is about. I am also going to research some of the futurists mentioned above.
