The building of the The Electrical Management (Elektroprivreda) Building in Sarajevo was designed in 1978 but was destroyed when the city of Sarajevo was under blockade and military siege from 1992 to 1995. The Siege of Sarajevo was the longest siege in the history of modern warfare, conducted by the Serb forces of self-proclaimed Republika Srpska and Yugoslav People's Army (later transformed to the Army of Serbia and Montenegro), lasting from 5 April 1992 to 29 February 1996.

Lebbeus Woods travelled to Sarajevo in November of 1993, when he went invited -as a 'journalist'-at the invitation of Haris Pasovic, head of the Sarajevo International Film and Theater Festival, who was aware of Woods work from a lecture he has given in Sarajevo two years earlier. As he writes at his blog: "The Electrical Management Building, along with the Post Office, Parliament, National Library, mosques and churches were symbolic of the civic life of the city, and therefore were especially targeted by the besieging Bosnian Serb army. I met the architect of the building, Ivan Straus, one of the most respected architects in Yugoslavia, who was also very supportive of my presence and ideas. It was he, during a later visit, who asked me to design a reconstruction of the Electrical Management Building [...] The design for the reconstruction of the Electrical Management Building is a case study in the application of this theory. Most of the building would be restored to accommodate corporate offices of the known kind. However, in the space that had been literally blasted off by artillery fire, would be constructed a freespace, to be inhabited by those who, in the reinvention of ways to inhabit space, would open the way to the future."