A freespace structure was comissioned on June 16, 1991 by the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Zagreb, which is under the directorship of Professor Vladimir Malekovic. On June 26th, Croatia seceded from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and was invaded by the Yugoslav Army. Since then, civil war has engulfed regions of Croatia. Much blood has been shed, much suffering has followed. Croatia's cultural fabric has been decimated, and its once-prosperous economy has been virtually destroyed.

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The initial reception by the intellectual and arts community in Zagreb, and of the public, who became aware of the project through newspaper and magazine articles, was one of curiosity more than confirmation. To be sure, some of this curiosity centred on the fact that the architect was an American, from New York City. What does anyone from New York think of or care about Zagreb today? And why? Yet there is no doubt that curiosity also existed for reasons internal to the project presented entirely by drawings at the Museum of Arts and Crafts in April of 1991, reasons having to do with the very real and drastic changes then occurring, and about to occur, in the political and cultural life of the country. The idea of a series of mobile 'units of habitation' (occupied by whom was not clearly defined), packed with powerful communications and other advanced electronic instrumentation (also of unknown purpose), leaning against buildings, or suspended between them, occupying the streets of the city's centre like so many machines of war, could not help but provoke curiosity. Whether they were instruments of invasion, and, is so, to obtain what objectives, no one could say. Whether they were the refuges of gypsies intelligent and skilled enough to use the instrumentation, yet free in spirit enough to invent some purpose for its use not readily apparent, no one could say. Whether they are shelters for an elite who might seek to escape a coming storm of violence on a landscape about to be torn apart by war or social disorder, no one could say.

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I asserted that the freespace structures and the constantly shifting pattern and network they created were 'heterarchical', and therefore an integral part of a global structure of freely determined communication and authority befitting a highly mobile and culturally dynamic contemporary urban society. Many questions raised by this assertion remain unanswered. Are the structures reserved for an elite of well-placed and well-connected intellectuals, artists, scientists, or-perhaps-for officials of the city, already invested with authority? Or are the structures inhabited by those aggressive and 'inventive' enough to seize and hold them-criminals and con men and renegades? Or are the structures meant for 'all individuals', which must include workers and farmers and fishermen? If so, then how will they possibly make use of the advanced instrumentation that is essential to the network, the ephemeral, McLuhanesque community on this proposal depends?

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It is not possible to name any individual or group as the designated inhabitants of the freespace structures and the free-zone network, without compromising its open nature and structure. At the same time, if inhabitation of the structure and the network is left open to whoever can 'seize' them, by whatever means, then the freedom of this aggressive elite could become a tyranny for others. Whoever occupies the freespaces and the free-zone will have control of the powers inherent in them: the power of access to global communications networks, with their databases and privilegted information; the power to broadcast, and to interfere with the broadcasts of existing institutions of authority; the power to employ electronic instruments extending the senses and capacities for experimental means; the power to move the structures freely within public space, for purposes no longer 'public' in the presently accepted sense of the word. If these powers are in the hands of egoistic inventors of self and world, then any egalitarian idea of human freedom is placed decisively at risk. There is no way to mitigate this rist. It is inherent in the inhabitation of freespaces and free-zones, unbounded as they are by any logic imposed by existing conventions.

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The model of the heterarchical free-zone is a nucleic one- it begins with a small group of people, the inhabitants of the freespace structures. This group does not constitute a concentration of institutionalised authority- the freespace inhabitants have only the authority of their own performances. Their relationship to the city and its community depends solely on the quality of their interaction with them.

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The free-zone is established on the principle of dealogue, carried on through instrumentation extending the senses and capacities of individuals into domains of the microscopic and macroscopic, facilitating direct experience of them. A type of instrumentation will be invented that facilitates play on the broad field of an individual's knowledge and experiences, a type of free interaction- a dialogue- with one's self that is in fact the beginning of all communication and community.

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Freespace is a new spatial manifestation of the boundaries of individual autonomy. It is not interpreted by a social group in the form of a predetermined function or programme that is named, but only by an individual set of actions, purposes, meanings.

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Freespace is not demanded by any of the existing cultural or social institutions, or even by an individual who has in mind for it some particular use. It does not belong to any existing building type, which excludes it from the marketplace. Instead it is constructed by an individual or small working group sho see it in its inception as an instrument of transformation of 'self' and of 'world', by the very fact of its presence as a new, alien, indetyerminate condition. Therefore it has definite possibilities- one might better say, probabilities (in the statistical, or quantum mechanical sense)- of implementation. Freespaces have no preconceived way of inhabitation. They are not goal-determined. Instead they are akin to experimental laboratories, with very precisely defined apparatus that can be used for a finite, but wide range of experimental uses. It is up to the inhabitant to determine, within the limits of the physicalconditions of a particular freespace, how the freespace instrumentation- both architectural and electronic- will be used.

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The range of probabilities of a given freespace's use is determined by the jprecisely defined configuration- strong presence- of its spaces and forms. In inhabiting these, precision must be answered by precision, presence by presence.

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The Cartesian grid so beloved of Modern architecture- and of Post-Modern architecture too- is not precise, rather it is a generalised abstraction. As a spatial and formal construct, it has no character, and therefore can be occupied without character, a fact to which many contemporary buildings testify. The dulling monotony of office work, and the general mediocrity of its results, for example, are not the result of the generalised neutrality of the Cartesian grid on which office buildings are based, but are connected symbiotically with it, on both conceptual and phenomenological levels.

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Freespace, on the contrary, is quite precise spatially, demensionally, materially. Its precision lies in the differences between one freespace structure and the next, between one space within that structure and the others, between one surface, texture, colour, degree of newness or decay, degree of lightness or darkness resulting from shifting conditions of illumination. Freespaces are not idealised abstractions, but concrete, existential realisations. To inhabit them, one must be equally concrete in one's thoughts and actions. It is not merely a matter of responding to the material characteristics, of reacting, but of a direct engagement, requiring an initiative, amplified, rendered forceful by a confrontation with 'useless' space. One has to invent something from almost nothing. In this case, the 'almost'- the precise existential conditions- is the curcial factor, and the crisis. Unlike the occupier of idealised space, the inhabitant of freespace must live poised in the precise material matrix of the present. Each freespace structure contains spaces that can be occupied by one or more persons. Occupation precedes inhabitation, and it will no be easy.

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Freespace is 'useless and meningless' space- space constructed with no predetermined use or meaning. On one hand, it appears that this is an unprecedented type of space, one that could only be seriously considered in Post-Modern conditions of a superfluity of goods and services- a kind of luxury of space. On the other hand, these Post-Modern conditions, as they have affected belief and value systems that once gave cohesion to society, make it clear that all spaces are useless and meaningless, until they are inhabited in specific ways. The Cartesian system for organising space has no mor intrinsic usefulness or meaning than freespaces. The difference between these two has to do with their potential in the creation- through acts of inhabitation- of new values, purposes, users, meanings.

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In a sense, the conception and construction of freespace calls into question, or brings more into focus, the nature of constructed space generally, calling for a revaluation of existing cities and societies, as well as the 'use' and 'meaning' of any human life. My position is, however, not nihilistic. The assertion- through constructive action- of an intrinsic emptiness of human existence gives this emptiness value, which I refer to as a potential that an individual must realise through acts of inhabitation, acts of self-invention.

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Self-invention inevitably draws upon and embraces the full scope of an individual's experiences. No one is born brand new each day, each moment. Much is drawn from conceptions of the past in the form of personal memories and reflections, as well as a social consensus about what the past was and meant- history and tradition. This, indeed, forms a framework for personal interpretations and interactins with the present, but not more than that. Today the burden of responsibility for inventing meaning and usefulness, through action, is on each individual, drawing as he or she might from all available resources. This is the essence- and the crisis- of the Post-Modern condition, the condition that informs the way people live on the anarchical landscape of emptied meaning and voided authority.