Free, September 2000

This issue pushes against the limits of the word ‘free’; exposing its contradictions and its multivalent possibilities. Claire Robertson considers the vicissitudes of newly-minted internet surveillance programs. An essay by the Harvard Design School project on The City explodes the mythical spatial construction of Lagos, its freeconomic real estate model typified by the archetypal ‘big man’, and wonders whether the west will ever catch up. Rem Koolhaas’s photos of the city’s smouldering sprawl jar against Crighton Bone’s uninhabited landscapes. Where is freedom? Alain Fouraux’s Mad Scientific© liberates the house from the strictures of fixed architecture whilst Lee Powers and BUMP turn tele-shopping kitsch into high fashion.