William Day, B.Arch. ’29 and Kuai Yu, B.Arch. ’29 were elected by the architecture first-year class to lead the design and implementation process for the 125th Dragon Day event on March 28 at 1 p.m.
Each year, first-year students at Cornell’s College of Art, Architecture and Planning come together to build a dragon to parade around campus the last Friday before Spring Break. Ithaca locals, students and professors gather to watch the presentation.
Day and Yu spend most of their time communicating with the University, negotiating the logistics of road closures, routes pathways and managing the dragon’s progress with the first-year architecture class.
“[Dragon Day has] been a staple on campus,” Day said. “It's a big part of the department, and that first-year architecture experience that everybody remembers.”
As leaders, Day and Yu work alongside an e-board team consisting of divisions in advertising, construction, social media and t-shirt selling that helps to generate funding for constructing the dragon and subsequent parade event.
Lucas Leeds, B.Arch. ’29 and Brian Cocero, B.Arch. ’29 lead the construction of the dragon, gathering architecture students into a team that meets semi-weekly. The construction team started their process by deliberating design ideas, creating sketches and designing 3D models to use as the blueprint to begin the physical construction process.
The construction team devised several master models for the dragon body using strategies from their architecture classes. One of the initial models was a small-scale design made of balsa wood, simulating the soon-to-be large-scale beamed structure.
This year's theme, “How to Build Your Dragon,” is inspired by the DreamWorks Animation franchise ‘How to Train Your Dragon,’ an open-ended concept based on the assembly process of the dragon.
“Our dragon is encouraging people to participate in this dragon-building process. Anyone can leave their mark,” Cocero said of the theme.
One implementation of the theme that arose in Dragon Day team meetings included a dragon with a blank canvas for skin according to Leeds. At the end of the parade, the skin will be colored by water balloons, chalk, paint or coloring by spectators along the parade route to complete the building of the dragon.
However, the team aims to build on the original design by creating a complex base structure. In order to be efficient, the construction team will break the tradition of using many cut-up pieces to build the dragon by using whole, uncut wood beams.
“We're making a dragon essentially out of that same two-by-eight [wooden] beam we're buying without cutting it in any way. So the two-by-eight beam becomes a horn, a body, a neck [and] everything is made out of the same material,” Cocero said.
In anticipation of Dragon Day, an egg will be placed near Milstein Hall to mimic the idea that the dragon is about to hatch. According to Cocero, the egg is built by plywood beams that go around radially [from a center point of the egg] and is covered by tarp, serving as a parallel build to that of the dragon.
The planning and building process for Dragon Day, from t-shirt designs to dragon construction, is a long and grueling process that AAP students take on in tandem with their notoriously rigorous workloads.
“Even though us [architecture] students are so busy, there's a very fun aspect to this project, too,” Leeds said. “It's a little bit less of a ‘we have to do this for a class,’ and more like, ‘we're doing this because we love architecture.’ That's all really what it is about.”
