“What a big sun!” Passing by University Commons, students cannot help noticing the giant bamboo-made models “Hou-I Shoting the Sun.” Invited by Dream Community Development Foundation and the Jane Goodall Institute, more than 80 freshmen of Dept. of Architecture produced this work under the instruction of Dr. Sung Li-wen, Assistant Prof. of Dept. of Architecture. The models also joined the 2009 Dream Parade on Oct. 17, at Freedom Square. When the parade arrived at Kaidagelan Blvd., a party was held, in which a 16-people drum team had a performance with the bamboo-made works, attracting the passer-by’s attention.

Dept. of Architecture has cooperated with the Dream Parade for four years. This year, they took “legend” as their theme, using bamboos and steel wires to make the models of Kua-fu, Hou-I, sun, and six flying squirrels. Among the six flying squirrels, five are big ones and the other is small, and they can be assembled into a model of mountain god. As for the work of Kua-fu, students used breakthrough skills to build a 6-feet figure, and designed its blue and green masks that represent wind and plants according to the legend.

Dr. Sung indicated that this work was actually an experiment resulted from their past experience. In the future, they will challenge to build bigger models. On the day of parade, many kids were very excited about the moving human-shaped models, and some of them even went to shake hands with Hou-I. Due to its huge body, Kua-fu model almost bumped into the traffic light during the parade, which attracted audience to take pictures with exclamation.

Kuo Cheng-lin, a sophomore of Dept. of Architecture, said happily, “We tried to interact with the audience by delivering candies or saying hello to them with the flying squirrel models. It is a very interesting process, and I felt that all our hard work has tremendous feedback!” These models for parade have been put outside the Black Swan Exhibition Hall, in front of Building of Architecture Department, and at University Commons until Nov. 26. In addition, in order to let students from different departments see these works, the models will be put at different locations every two weeks. Dr. Sung is full of confidence in the performance of the freshmen of his department. “Although these freshmen are quite “fresh” in the college, the works reveal their surprising potentiality,” said Dr. Sung.

( ~Shu-chun Yen )