The Project EASA 1997

A Scandinavian collaboration. 300 students of architecture from 36 European countries meet and create a small mobile community with a train-set as a base for all activities. The participants experience, illuminate, and analyze the evolutionary process of the two week train-trip through Scandinavia.
The train allows for a large amount of freedom, independence, possibility of contact, and exploration of the meetings of structures. The train as an experiment; A society without physical foundation in contrast to more traditional forms of society. The trip itself is a goal.

Concept Mobile - Stationary

The global development has made us less and less fixed to a geographical site. Goods, services, and information travel larger distances with ever increasing speed. Formerly, a society´s existence depended on the natural resources of a certain site, but today, society is based on global exchange of goods and information. Today, man is less bound to a geographical point, a local society, or a family. However, our base is still a fixed stationary structure in known surroundings connecting us to the rest of the world.

Often the safe home is defined in a stationary geographical location. A journey from these known surroundings is the unknown, unsafe, and dangerous. EASA 1997 turns this around. Now safety is defined in a mobile home, the train, racing through unknown territory. Only when the train stops do the surroundings become readable and a feeling of insecurity arises.

The mobile society is an extrovert contact-seeking structure. Spontaneous meetings between visitors and locals are made possible. Dialog is probable. The movement is a process, not really a journey, as starting and ending point have, in the traditional sense, lost their meaning. Of outmost importance are the gradual changes and the meeting of different societies.

Which society emerges? What is needed for this structure to live, evolve or even survive?

Goal

With an inspiring theme, we hope to create an exciting and creative atmosphere which inspires new ideas and reflections on our society today and tomorrow. We wish to initiate a general debate which will improve communication between architects, students of architecture, and the public.
We wish to create an understanding of architecture not only as an outer form but as something which affects our immediate surroundings from the light in the most spartan of rooms to the pattern of entire cities and landscapes. Architecture affects us and our surroundings in a considerable and often unconsious way.

Realization

We create a mobile society in Copenhagen. The participants establish themselves in the modest wagons within and about which they are to spend the coming two weeks. Different functions, private and public, take shape and may transform during the journey through Scandinavia. The journey takes us to cities and places which differ in many ways, both in climate, geography, history, inhabitants and therefore also in architecture.

Through workshops, we investigate the qualities of the sites and of the journey to achieve an improved architectural understanding of the values and spaces we work with every day.

At the end of our journey, the different workshops present their work using photographs, drawings, texts, sculpture, installations, video, preformances. The train itself and its interiors is a documentation of the birth, life, and death of a society.

Time Schedule/ Route

This route is the basis for our planing. Scandinavia is rich in variation both in landscape and social structures. The route is chosen hereby.

Conditions

As the application fees are not suffient to cover the expenses for a project of this size and complexity, EASA 1997 is, as in the past, completely dependent on finanicial support, voluntary labor, sponsorship, good-will and cooperation with private enterprises and federal organizations.

Conclusion

Knowledge of EASA is spread through a network of national contacts in practically all European countries, both East and West. EASA is open for initiative when it comes to how and when it is to be. A group of students from Denmark, Sweden, and Norway have taken the initiative to arrange EASA 1997. Eventually, organisors from all the schools of architecture in Scandinavia will be included.

EASA is not only a cradle for experimental architecture and new methods, but also a platform for better communication and cooperation in a Europe which today is both more open and more divided.

In 1997, we hope to create a remarkable European event which will impact many more than the participants alone.

Easa Scandinavia