“Computers don’t have ambition,” he said. “They don’t say, ‘I want to control people.’ They don’t have gut instincts.”

Jacque Fresco was born in Brooklyn on March 13, 1916, to Isaac Fresco, a horticulturalist, and the former Lena Friedlich, a homemaker. His parents wanted him to be a sign painter, like his uncle, but he was devoted to studying mathematics, conducting science experiments in the family bathroom and building advanced models of ships and aircraft. At 13, he designed a fan with rubber or fabric blades after a relative was hurt when he stuck his hand into a metal fan.

“I submitted the design to some companies, but they showed no interest,” he said in a 2011 interview on Facebook. “Shortly after that the product came out on the market. That was my introduction to the marketplace.”

He did not like attending school and was often a truant. By his early teens, he was on his own.

At some point, he said, he went to Florida, where he caught poisonous snakes in the Everglades and sold them to circuses. He never attended college and occasionally fretted in later years that his lack of academic credentials might have limited his impact.

After hitchhiking to California, he started a career as an aircraft and architectural designer, research engineer, creator of rocket models for science-fiction films and designer of prefabricated aluminum homes that were displayed at the Warner Bros. studio. During World War II, he said, he served in the Army Air Forces’ design and development unit at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio.

He predicted in 1956 that there would be “saucerlike” space stations, elevators that moved horizontally as well as vertically and, presciently, driverless cars.

Cars, he said, would have “proximity control” that would render collisions “impossible.”

Mr. Fresco had been thinking of a planned city, like the one laid out in Project Venus, since at least the 1950s. His work on it intensified after he moved to Florida, where he sketched out “Project Americana,” a scheme in which “sensitive machines” would react to the environment to cool and clean the city, direct traffic and close floodgates, he told Florida Living magazine in 1961.