Via Cesar Alonso, thanks for the link.
Some of the ideas in this
Venus Project are amazing, on the conceptual level, the pragmatic and creative ones. On the other hand, the designs Jacques Fresco is proposing really don't match the philosophy : "James Bond Grand architecture for a more equitable world" just don't really make me believe it is a "new direction".
What disrupts me with a singular "ENTIRELY NEW UPDATED SYSTEM" : I don't believe a visionary architect can propose an entire new way of life and vocabulary ; I believe in how new technologies and new ideas slowly infiltrate and change people's lives, not as one grand radical proposal, but rather many small working transitions. So, as an architect you want to modify the system not by the designing the whole system, but designing intelligent components that will facilitate the creative sustainable activities of other humans. To summarize, it is not about inventing an entire new system, but about programming good building components.
Also I must disagree on the discourse that says Industrial revolution will make us free. This is what we have been attempting since 300 years, the same old ideal future that we never reach, a future for a free "updated new" class (a rich minority of "visionaries") that the rest of humanity must labour and pay for it... Our society is industrial, I am not sure getting rid of 90% of human labour with new supertechnological means is the good underlying priority in the agenda...
In other words, the Jaques Fresco "Venus Project" is an interesting and inspiring Utopian project. Someone has to dream, and show a bundle of possibilities to the majority, and the rest of us, as actor-consumers, can buy into it, more or less. Jacques Fresco is doing his job being the figure of the grand visionary architect for a glorious future, I respect that ; but I think to deeply impact the world, every single human needs to have the freedom, capacity and desire to the the architect of his/her own life. And that might not be possible in a world where resources are limited.
So it goes back to the beginning of the Venus project : "a Resource Based Economy". On this everyone can agree, we need to start by considering the resource before making grand plans. The architect should publicly employ his creative mind to fabricate this fabulous tool that will give an entire new perception of our actual system, a tool with which a new -probably much less fancy than described- future can be built.
Also, you cannot be ethically at both ends of the chains : you cant be judge and jury, and if you are : don't expect any credibility.
It is scary for other to have one grand vision that incorporates all the aspects of a NEW life, it is too intimidating and normative.
To conclude : to work out this "not-new" resource limited word, let's do it in the right order : first, let's set up the "sensors" to measure this limited and changing world.
Before we invent super great grand designs and strategies, let's simply get to know what is happening, and make that knowledge available to everyone.
- There is an open-source project that enables people to do that today :
http://pachube.com- There is a global observatory system :
http://earthwatch.unep.net/data/g3os.php- There is an ocean division of this global observation system that works :
http://www.argo.net
So, at that point in history, the glory isn't in the grand future design, but
being creatively contributing to these observation and action project.
Personally that's what I am trying to do with
Open_Sailing project, and with the
World Environment Organization : trying to build open-source instruments to contribute to existing necessary researches. What's interesting is that the complexity of the infrastructure make the CENTRAL figure of the architect obsolete, a good system needs that each participant of the distributed system is an architect, towards a collective wisdom and creativity,
social innovation, object oriented politics (Latour),
adhocracy, highly tolerant and
entropic "
open architecture" and "architecture of play".
Trace an oval on the floor with some chalks
how it looks in the end.
