“We had to wrangle everyone to pick a theme.”īorrowing the theme of “Apocalypse” from Mayan prophecy, the students are tying it to Cornell’s sesquicentennial through such design elements as a “150” on the McGraw clock tower about to be destroyed by the dragon on the event T-shirts, sold to raise funds for the next class of first-years. The co-presidents were elected to lead the Dragon Day effort in the first week of classes, and “within a couple of weeks we were starting a design process,” Cullen said. “We had to do a lot of yelling to get this started,” said co-president Maddy Eggers, B.Arch. “The pace of all our classes this year has picked up and having this on top of it has been stressful.” “We’ve gotten very close as a class,” said Dragon Day co-president Ainslie Cullen, B.Arch. The colorful 114-year-old Cornell tradition continues March 27 with the first-years accompanying their creation in a parade at 1 p.m., on a route circling from Rand Hall to the Arts Quad. The annual Dragon Day celebration is a teambuilding effort for the students and a spring ritual on campus. The imagination, technical knowledge and labor of 52 first-year architecture students, who carve out time for the extracurricular project between classes and during nights at their studio workstations in Milstein Hall or in the Rand Hall shops.

Fabiana Berenguer cuts metal piping for the dragon’s frame behind Rand Hall on March 23.įifteen hundred feet of quarter-inch to 1.5-inch steel, 72 yards of fabric, 64 cubic feet of insulation foam, wooden jigs for construction, suspension cables and a little paint and glue.

Dragon frame cost