some thoughts ... [as a reponse to jerome's and dunk's post]

Set into the world in 81, easa is a monster, a body without organs …. Everchanging, rhizomatic, always on the quest for its own identity, always struggling with itself for its sense, living at the edge to a Club-Med-like kindergarden for architecture students and still aiming at raising its awareness and quality level.

It’s often a precarious balance – people complaining about it’s easy going and thinking it to be just a pretext for having fun and internationl flirts (they did so already 20 yrs ago).

Though it is still alive and unique – as far as I know – in its form. Right in the early eighties – far before the internet era, they talked about networking. Far before eMails and chats and blogs they did so by snail-mail and fax.

It is a beast – the head in the clouds but feet on the ground. For being set up every year by a new team, being confronted to the same logistical and organisational probs anew, it is a fact that knowledge transfer from one year to the other might be the major lack. The beast’s memory is short. Three to four years at best – as long as the “dinosaurs” stick to it. There is nearly no “best practice”, no long term experience of more experienced members like in a firm that always grows and builds and expands[*].

Just the “easa-guide”, a document hardly read by even the NCs or organizers, holds grasp of the past practical experiences. The monster’s weakness might be one of its strengths. The same problems are always thought over anew – sometimes with astonishing results. It gives orga-teams the chance to experience an always unique and new experiment.

As such, paces of “evolution” towards a higher professionality are hard to take. Whilst they’ve been claimed for nearly right from the start in the 80s, it would need a more institutionalised EASA to do so. The monster would be compelled getting organs, a skeleton, with professiona archiving, knowledge transfer, it would need to become a kind of firm, an agency or foundation with a registered trademark, a corporate image and design, its lawyer and accountant.

But it would loose its soul of experimental “from students for students” alter-academical character, and maybe even it's spirit?

cheers aLx_Be

ps: this is an invitation to all that feel concerned to read the easa guide - as stated at the incm_bgd - and the archive ... matter of lenghten easa's short memory ;-) [*] which is actually a typical ark's problem: always starting from zero, a scratch when designing ... whereas some migt think "aren't the housing probs all the same? why always start from zero?" .... others might think that this is what makes designs unique ...