EASA — The journey.
I was kindly asked by the team organising SESAM Ukraine to contribute to their participant call out. To give some information to aspiring participants about EASA and perhaps even inspire them to join. I happily accepted. But i started writing some things like “Consider everything in EASA an experiment” and “Easa is a living laboratory of ideas.” Both of these are true: In easa there is no grading system or a set system or accountability for outcomes of the education provided. It gives a unique freeform opportunity to test different educational systems, processes and ideas. But there is a lot more to it - and i struggled to express this just with snappy straplines. Every point i made felt like i was missing an entire backstory to contextualise EASA within a larger cultural discourse. Sadly, despite running for 40 years, you would struggle to find any writing or article that effectively positions EASA in the context of radical and utopian pedagogies.
EASA has seen the most talented architects in the world join and contribute, from every school in the world. To many it is a sacred and a shared learning space for an expansive European architecture community — that has handed down through consecutive generations of students and young professionals. However, in order to retain authenticity and decentralisation EASA has made sacrifices. It never had any longterm paid staff. It has also never articulated, shared and publicised outputs and learnings. This has always been a major systemic challenge amongst all decentralised and co-operative organising.
There is something incredibly romantic in this inability to contextualise itself, it creates a feeling of endless possibility, of total reinvention; it also means that EASA has successfully continued to exist beyond the mainstream architectural or media lens and therefore resisted pressure to commodify itself. Occupying a perpetual position of importance for the architectural profession. It has become more like an unseen substructure, working from the bottom up. With this all said, i decided to write a concise history from my understanding to help the participants to make quicker sense of it
Poly-arch
It is possible to understand EASA by analysing some of the cultural DNA in the ideas at time of origin: 1970’s Britain an architect named Cedric Price created a bold project called Polyarch where he and a team of students converted a double decker bus into a sort of nationwide architecture education unit that operated between schools,¹ its aim was to create an education revolution to “unite rather than separate the student community”² Acting as a quasi-union, semi-network — and mobile education institution. The lesson from Cedric is that there is an intimate link between free, mutual education platforms and an expansive view of the profession which leads to architectural unionism between different schools and professionals. The thing Cedric Price exposed is this; we must move beyond schools, companies and professional titles for the profession to retain it’s resilience. The format was successful in propagating a progressive, expansive attitude among students and formed the germ of the Winter Schools movement. ³
The Winter Schools
The first Winter School was held in Sheffield in the late 70’s — moving from city to city in a decentralised way.⁴ This format of grass roots direction lasted for several years. Eventually the winter schools were replicated to become permanent fixtures of most schools; “it became like a badge of honour to have a winter school, and if you didn’t have one you were falling behind” ⁵ and over time they almost became a part of the curriculum itself. Winter Schools were popular until the nineties but then “almost all of the winter schools were cut” ⁶ . This is partially because of new trends in educational practice, postmodernism gained purchase in the 1980s and 1990s, And the neoliberalisation of education brought budget cuts that meant that new, financially focussed entry requirements were introduced.⁷ As an idea that inherently resisted the commodification of education, the winter-schools represented a more emancipatory form of education. But this didn’t chime with the budget restrictions and emerging ideological condition of mainstream education system. It also defied the top heavy trends of the senior academic circles who regularly withdrew funded support.
In most cases academic modules align with job creators needs, who align their business model with the dominant economic system. Mutualism resists oppressed thinking that comes with this frame, and allows participants to voice opinions to progress new styles of architecture as they might relate to the real needs of the community, place and culture. It also has to be said that all senior academics have a career that depends a deterministic education model rather than a mutualist one.
Academics have a financial incentive to preserve the status quo. “I teach you - you don’t teach me, otherwise what would justify the salaried position?” Naturally the economic force is to entertain the more anarchic form of education as a novelty, but dismiss it ultimately. Like a radical shot to accompany a largely conservative education. The winter shool’s could be seen to act like a vaccine, A small exposure to allow students to experience, toy with, and ultimately avoid temptation.
This said; It is easy to blame a shift in ideology as a blanket reason for failure of a project, the most convincing criticism is that the Winter Schools allowed themselves to become over centralised and therefore rely too heavily on central university funding.
A network of ideas
In 1981 EASA was founded by the then RIBA national student representative Geoff Haslam and Richard Murphy.⁸ They explicitly ‘Took take the format of the winter-schools but make them Europe wide’ ⁹ Geoff being ‘somewhat of an anarchist’¹⁰ was a peer of Colin Ward, and adopted many of his ideas into the initiating of EASA — especially those on social policy.¹¹ Colin believed in maintaining a wholly distributed structure of mutual organisation. By keeping easa open, egalitarian and accessible, with genuinely consensus based management Geoff therefore managed to advance the ideas of those like Cedric Price, by mixing them with the clear practical lessons in functional anarchism from Colin Ward.¹²
A social licence for change
Easa was not made out of leisure or egotism but out of urgent necessity. In the early 1980’s the city of Liverpool was riot torn and Richard and Geoffs school or architecture and was threatened with closure.¹³ Young Geoff and Richard together needed a way to politically evidence the value of their school to the authorities and the wider public.¹⁴ Richard Murphy being ”an incredibly talented politician”¹⁵ thought up an ingenious way to show consensus by inviting students from across Europe, every country, to a huge summer school — focussed on and in Liverpool. They delivered education but in the process created the right political scenario to evidence a clear majority in favour of actively saving the Liverpool School. To Richard then, the creation of EASA as an education system was a ‘carrot’¹⁵ which allowed the team to build a very clear international consensus against closing the school to the local level powers. An incredible geometry for solidarity emerged.
In principal then, we can see easa is positioned amongst several optimistic pedagogies. Fundamentally being the middle point between a Union and an education platform, with student led education being the gateway to evidence some larger social or political licence. Can these two ideas, unions and education ever exist without one another? Probably not. We need to come together to get any real education, and bringing people together — always creates union between cultures. For architecture then these structures are still useful in that they lend themselves to train people, create new ways of thinking and doing architecture but whilst uniting people in a way that allows them to affect positive change — easa still underpins the upward movement for progressive change in the profession. It still exists and works! Over 40 years later is operating in the same distributed way; without a central body or even a registered charity. Each individual country has their own self assembling participating group which works locally to enable open access and genuinely consensus management. It’s continually evolving.
EASA has grown into arguably one the longest running, and largest mutual-aid educational systems continuously running not only in the field or architecture - but across disciplines. It is a gleaming example of what mutualist education really looks like and there are a rare few case studies like it. It not only evidences that mutual education systems can plausibly work over the long term, but are also are also more resilient than mainstream education institutions in upholding the core values of learning and teaching above catering for finance. What education really means.
To avoid it being a finishing school EASA operates almost as an undergrowth for the entire profession, under the radar for most of the general architectural discourse — but constantly there.
EASA today
There are several high quality educational events throughout the year, including ‘small assemblies’ Intermediate national contact meetings (Like an AGM), and of course the EASA summer event where over 600 students attend. Easa events are expanding across the world ¹⁶ “Beginning from what from what is local and immediate and linking in a with network with no centre and no directing agency, hiving off new cells as the original grows.” ¹⁷ Just one example are the new Zero Carbon Architecture groups growing from the EASA network and co-ordinating in every part of the world simultaneously to apply local level pressure, building from the “Young Architects Declare” strategies developed during the most recent event. Contributing to and being part of this incredible heritage is the best way to contextualise some of EASA’s integral ideas and processes.
To this day EASA has never made money from the sale of education — as many mainstream education institutions do today, defying the the rigidity of the social class based education system. The idea of universities commodifying social class forms a blockade in educational possibilities and limits the experimentation possible. The format is generally in favour of accessibility. And everyone involved does absolutely everything in a non-profit capacity — from helping with the washing up to helping with a jigsaw. This creates an upwards pressure to increase accessibility, age, gender or income balance, from all tutors, participants and organisers.
The activity in EASA is not prioritized according to any kind of centralised funding superstructure. Many education systems exist because of the research grants available. EASA exists despite them. This enables testing completely new methods of education, and in turn this allow new knowledge to be unearthed. Meaning that easa’s workshop accommodates in the most uncontrollable way the entire spectrum of the cultural dialogue. Filling a gap by occupying a key space in the global educational dialogue.
The journey continues — advice for being part of EASA
For everybody it is very important to stress that Easa is not structureless, ¹⁷it is liberal and mutualist, working in the trust you will do a brilliant job. As far as liberal is concerned: It is totally up to the tutor to design the structure. This is part of the challenge, how do we better the education system as a whole? How does your workshop indicate a new, better way of doing things? Take the opportunity to advance important ideas.
As far as mutualism is concerned: Try to share your knowledge as deeply and as openly as you can. The event becomes rich only because and only everyone does shares openly. “I help you today, knowing somebody else some other day will help me” ¹⁸ and if participants, organisers and tutors engage deeply and meaningfully with the same spirit, we all begin to experience a network effect that magnifies the learning and teaching potential. Easa also has a culture of young people teaching young people, so don’t be afraid to share what you know. You have a particular cultural background and knowledge — this is your time to share it. In any case. because ‘the world is evolving at such a fast pace that the gap between tutor and student needs to be closer and closer to ensure cultural relevance.’ ²⁰ EASA workshops disembark squarely from school or work, they tend to embrace a learning culture that is immersive, as-well as appreciating cultural informalities of the time, taking down formal boundaries to blur live work boundaries, towards the absolute creative exchange.
EASA Is a place to bring people together to make a real change. This years EASA and SESAM is are both in very significant locations, in a very important part of the world — in a time when it needs us. Your attendance will spearhead this change — in the same way bringing EASA to Liverpool did over 40 years ago. We may have to to look back 40 years from now to realise this, but the political licence EASA opens up for positive change is vast, and the impact can be great. If only we can use it correctly we can be part of this city’s history as it finds it’s pathway, and change the city for the better. So operate with focus and generosity.
