Jason Koski/University Photography

Elias Bennett uses a grinder to cut metal rods on the frame of the architecture students' dragon as Oonagh Davis looks on March 23 behind Rand Hall.

Dragon Day, one of Cornell’s oldest and most famous traditions, returns Friday, March 25, with a parade starting at 1 p.m. behind Rand Hall on University Avenue. First-year architecture students in costume will escort a dragon across campus as the culmination of weeks of intensive planning, design and construction.

Traffic will be redirected along the parade route from 12:30 p.m. until after 2 p.m., while spectators line the streets.

The B.Arch. ’20 class of architects has about 50 students involved in the Dragon Day effort, including nearly 20 on an executive board. The board focuses on division of labor, organizing shifts for tasks including construction and fundraising on campus through T-shirt sales. More than 1,000 Dragon Day shirts were ordered this year.

“Anyone who wants a role in some capacity is getting one,” said Elias Bennett, Dragon Day co-president with Silvia Galdamez. “Out of a class of 57, we’re pretty close to full participation. Dragon Day has always been about the stress and the bonding that comes out of that.”

With guidance from advisers and shop managers in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning, the team’s preparation for Dragon Day also includes discussing safety and logistics with Cornell’s Division of Risk Management, Environmental Health and Safety and Cornell University Police.

As for how the dragon will look and perform, Bennett shared some of the class’s ideas but was careful not to give too much away. “I’ve been told to be as mysterious as I can be,” he cautioned. “Last year, there was a trend toward the apocalyptic and the doomsday. We’ve been looking at a lot of footage from past years where the dragon was a little bit more whimsical.”

He continued, “Because of the versatility and strength of the material it’s still a steel construction and a lightweight frame, but we’re hoping to bring a little bit more character and color to it. We’re hoping to have a more comprehensive dragon than last year, with articulating body parts. They had a really fantastically sculpted headpiece last year, and we hope to bring that level of attention to the tail and … my construction team will be very angry with me if I spoiled all the tricks.”

While the beast’s design remained mostly under wraps at Rand Hall before Dragon Day, rival students in the Phoenix Society had their own secrets. Across campus on the engineering quad, College of Engineering first-years typically prepare a phoenix to challenge the dragon each year.

“I heard from my roommate he saw some Phoenix T-shirts being sold – but we’re pretty confident, if history tells us anything, that we won’t have too much competition,” Bennett said. “There was a sketch [of a phoenix] that was –supposedly – sent by accident to one of us; we’re still trying to figure that out.”

Other students have randomly added their own creatures to the sidelines of the annual festivities in the past, including a unicorn made by a group of physics students and a giant burlap bunny created by art majors.

The Friday parade travels from Rand Hall down the length of East Avenue, passes the Engineering Quad where the rival factions cheer and jeer at each other, then goes west along Campus Road, turning onto Ho Plaza and ending on the Arts Quad.

The Dragon Day tradition on campus began at the turn of the 20th century as College of Architecture Day, initiated by architecture student Willard Straight, Class of 1901. The celebration was initially held on St. Patrick’s Day. The current tradition and its associated revelries, held just before spring break, date to the 1950s.

“It’s a rollercoaster, like every year,” Bennett said. “A general thing I can say about architecture [students] is that we push ourselves. It’s all voluntary, but all of us as students are extremely self-motivated. We are all about the push, and when you’re in that peak experience it’s when the class comes together.”