We're the biggest architecture student association that youíve never heard of. We're part union, part forum and part network. It's free and all architecture students are automatically members. ARCHAOS was founded in 1999 by the two student representatives on RIBA council who thought that architecture students needed some sort of body to represent them and to communicate with RIBA and other bodies on their behalf. We're a voice for student architects - a forum to discuss issues that concern us, a platform from which to campaign on them and also a network - a place for us to get together to discuss ideas and collaborate on projects.
ARCHAOS is run by students, for students. The two co-chairs this year are Bonnie Chu and Alison Killing and feel free to get in touch - the email addresses are on the contacts page. There is also an exec; it's made up of students from around the country and any architecture student can join. Every school sends two reps to the biannual forums and we also have an online forum where any architecture student can post.
So what have we got planned for the year? Lots. We're doing a tour of all the schools at the start of the year, we've got two national forums (the first at the start of November), we're doing an installation at the London Architecture Biennale, which we want as many students as possible to be involved in, we plan to run a design competition and we want to continue to build the network of architecture students. Read on...
Network> This is maybe the most important bit - YOU ARE ARCHAOS. We're here to help students get together, discuss issues - everything from design to climate change to fees - and collaborate. Post your events on the online forum for the rest of the country to see, send us write-ups of projects that you're doing and reviews of events and get talking to students across the country on the online forum - it's yours to use.
Forums> We hold two forums a year with representatives from all the architecture schools in the country. The next one is going to be 3 and 4 November at Oxford Brookes and we're going to be talking about the impact of fees, what we can do and what we want to do, from changing the structure of our courses to trying to set up more bursaries. The RIBA Vice President (Education) Simon Allford has just released a paper setting out proposals for changes to the architecture courses in the UK and the validation criteria (which set out what you need to do to pass the part 1 and part 2) are up for review in 2006. ARCHAOS is going to be involved in discussing these changes and we want to know what you think so that we can represent architecture students' views properly - you can register on our online forum and your school will sending two reps along to our forum in November too.
Schools tour> At the moment we're also doing a tour of all the architecture schools in the country - all 35 of them. We want to get the word out about ARCHAOS, to find out what's going on in the schools and also to run a survey. The survey is about the costs of the course, course length etc etc and is to give us the information to have an informed debate when it comes to the forum in November.
Biennale> We're making plans at the moment for the ARCHAOS intervention at the biennale. The student festival kicked off in the first week of September, when we ran a workshop at London Met University with 35 students from 18 schools. Ten teams worked on designs for 10 sites across London, which will be presented at 100% detail - you can read what went on on the online forum.