EASA Seanchaí is the 46th annual European Architecture Students Assembly, organised in Waterford, Ireland, 25.7.-09.8.2026.
Organised by students, for students, EASA offers a unique framework for education, accommodating a non institutionalised way of teaching, learning and exchange. A horizontal learning process where decisions are made upon consensus, EASA gives a chance to experience architecture in a way that universities are yet not providing. Bringing students to a certain context, defined by the location and theme of the assembly, where they have to raise architectural questions themselves and investigate them through the eyes of all European cultures simultaneously. Being their own educators, students then elaborate the answers and bring them to reality.
T H E M E
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Who is the Seanchaí?
The Seanchaí is a traditional Irish storyteller: a vessel of memory, custodian of myth, and guardian of collective voice.
Through rhythm, gesture, and emotion, they preserved histories, moral lessons, and cultural wisdom at a time when few could read or write. They were travelling archives, carrying stories across landscapes and communities, ensuring that knowledge was shared, reshaped, and remembered. The Seanchaí reminds us that storytelling binds us, shaping our understanding of ourselves and the world.
The theme of EASA 2026 is Seanchaí
Seanachaí Peig Sayers in her home, Co. Clare
Today, instant communication and digital media have diminished the traditional seanchaí, but the responsibility to carry memory and meaning remains. Revisiting this role reignites storytelling’s relevance as resistance, as archive, and as human connection within a globalised society.
Oral traditions were once radical: egalitarian, accessible, and subversive when language, culture, and identity were suppressed.
For EASA 2026, we see storytelling not as separate from design, but as embedded within it. Every drawing, material choice, and construction detail carries a narrative of origins, processes, and people.
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The seanchaí teaches us that archives need not be fixed. Stories are living, and open to interpretation - always layered, never complete. In the same way, ephemeral structures, temporary interventions, and collaborative acts at EASA 2026 will become vessels of new stories, reflecting the culture of their making and the voices of those who inhabit them.
Participants are challenged to weave their own narratives from the threads of Waterford’s fabric—its histories, communities, material and immaterial traces. The tradition of storytelling is not unique to Ireland; similar traditions are ingrained in communities worldwide. We encourage participants to bring their own cultural understandings, personal narratives, and inherited practices into dialogue with the seanchaí, enriching the exchange with diverse voices and perspectives.
How do we preserve or reshape identity through the spaces we create? How can we design spaces so their stories are visible, adaptable, and shared across generations?
EASA 2026 will be hosted
in Waterford, Ireland.
Waterford, Ireland’s oldest city, offers a potent and pivotal setting for reawakening the role of storytelling in architecture’s storytelling role. As the site of Ireland’s first urban settlement, it marks a turning point where oral traditions began to fade, gradually overshadowed by urbanisation, industrialisation, and written record. Yet the city’s layered fabric — from Viking roots to modern interventions — still hums with embedded memory. By returning to this place, we hope to reintroduce the spirit of the Seanchaí, exploring how architecture might once again carry meaning through presence, symbol, and space.Attendees of EASA 2026 will take on the role of the contemporary seanchaí: uncovering hidden histories, creating new interpretations, and embedding their own stories within the city’s fabric.Together, we shall ask: how can design keep stories alive, adaptable, and shared across generations?
