Winter Schools – Cold Weather, Warm Minds
The history of Winter School (WS) is rooted in the same spirit that gave birth to EASA: dissatisfaction with rigid academic structures, a longing for open dialogue, and the belief that students could shape their own educational spaces. But in fact, Winter School predates EASA — and in many ways helped inspire the forms of alternative architectural education that would soon spread across Europe.
Origins: UK in the Late 1970s
The history of Winter School (WS) is rooted in the same spirit that gave birth to EASA: dissatisfaction with rigid academic structures, a longing for open dialogue, and the belief that students could shape their own educational spaces. But in fact, Winter School predates EASA — and in many ways helped inspire the forms of alternative architectural education that would soon spread across Europe.
“Whose education is it anyway?”
The Glasgow ’80 Winter School, described as an “enfant terrible”, aimed to radically shift architectural education — placing architects and students on equal footing and fostering exchange between schools across the UK. This model continued to grow and evolve throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
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Winter Schools were held in cities like Liverpool (1986), Edinburgh (1987), Dublin (1991), Belfast (1993), Glasgow (1994), Birmingham (1995) and others. While typically shorter and more theory-driven than EASA, they were often bold in format — combining workshops with lectures, performances, public debates, and exhibitions. Many events took place in non-traditional spaces: industrial ruins, community halls, activist venues — transforming overlooked places into sites of shared learning.
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One of the most remarkable moments in Winter School history was Dublin 1991, which gathered over 1,200 participants and hosted 50+ workshops — an extraordinary scale for an event that began as a grassroots UK initiative. This was a turning point, demonstrating that an alternative architectural education could also be international, ambitious, and community-led — without becoming institutional.
Transition and Overlap with SESAM
By the mid-1990s, Winter Schools began to change. Rather than disappearing, they ran in parallel with a new generation of small-scale gatherings emerging across Europe — inspired both by Winter School and by EASA’s model.
In 1992, the first event officially called SESAM (Small European Students of Architecture Meeting) was held in Villafamés, Spain, with 50 participants. SESAM took the scale, intimacy, and theoretical focus of Winter School and brought it into the growing European network — bridging between local and international, action and reflection.
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During the late 1990s, Winter School and SESAM overlapped — their names sometimes used interchangeably, their formats mixing. The Newcastle Winter School in 1999, themed “Lines”, is often traced as one of the final WS events. From the early 2000s onward, SESAM fully took over as the main small-format gathering in the EASA ecosystem, while the original Winter School tradition slowly faded.
Legacy and Reinvention
Although the Winter School format eventually faded, it left behind a rich legacy of theory-driven, action-based gatherings that opened important conversations within the architectural student community.
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With the upcoming Winter School in Liechtenstein, we aim to breathe new life into the format — not by recreating the past, but by redefining it in response to current conditions and emerging needs.
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This new edition is not just a nostalgic revival — it’s a response. A space for the EASA community to slow down, focus, and engage deeply with the topics that often get lost in the rush of the summer assembly or the politics of INCM. A smaller, more reflective, and bonding experience — one that brings together people who want to act together and rethink what architectural education and community mean today.
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Winter School now stands at the crossroads between SESAM and INCM — a working group event, grounded in the EASA spirit but shaped by the realities of our time.
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A space to reconnect, reflect, and regain the strength to act — together, on common GROUND.
The EASA Winter School GROUND is co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union as part of the broader project Resonate + Ground.
