Origami Tessellations

We just got back from NYC a few days ago; my wife Bekah just finished uploading the majority of our photos, if you’re inclined to take a look.

It was a lot of fun, and we were able to meet up with many flickr folding friends, both old and new. I’m very thankful for such a great chance to meet so many of you in person!

Some highlights that I enjoyed:

(title shot) – Bekah’s kirigami artwork of the Sun and Water, assembled (or deconstructed?) in Jeff’s Harlem studio.

32 two-dollar bills, folded as a single sheet, by me:

Some great work from Christine Edison:

Brian Chan:

Fantastic tessellated Romanesco cauliflower, again by Brian Chan:

Pureland Tessellations by Goran Konjevod:

Ray Schamp’s Corrugations:

More beautiful tessellations and masks from Joel Cooper:

Astonishing pieces from Polly Verity, our new folding friend from Scotland:

And, of course, some photos from our visit to Jen Stark’s exhibition at the LMak Projects over in Williamsburg:

(this last piece is my favorite!)

Bekah and I are heading to NYC tomorrow morning, to do a little touristing and personal meet-ups before the Origami USA convention June 22-25 at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan.

I will be teaching two classes, one complex class on folding tessellations from this scallop shell unit, and one intermediate class on "tessellation basics". To that end, I whipped together a little booklet covering a few of the basic concepts, using some materials and ideas from my upcoming book. It’s really just a bit of a taste of the topic, but I wanted to help people grasp some of the simple bits, so the class would be a bit easier to teach- teaching is hard work, and I get easily sidetracked.

I will be posting a version of the 8 page booklet online after the convention, once I have an opportunity to shake out anything that the class (or others) feel is a little confusing, needs clarification, etc.

Jamie Kelley of Vancouver helped out enormously by taking my random snippets of text and imagery and wrangling them into a nice collection of pages. Thanks so much, Jamie! I’m very impressed with the final product.

For those of you going to the convention, who might be in NYC ahead of time- if you’d like to meet up for coffee or dinner please shoot me an email at origomi@mac.com, and we’ll see what we can arrange. I’m hoping to spend some quality time talking with other like-minded folders without the crush of the convention atmosphere, so if you’re interested in having a chat let me know.

Oddly enough, I always seem to travel on my birthday- tomorrow I turn 29 years old. The last year seems to have just whizzed past at a rapid pace. What new exciting things will the next year hold? I can’t wait to find out.

UPDATE: You can now download the PDF!

My wife Bekah folded this wonderful model of Tom Hull’s the other afternoon, to display at the OUSA convention in NYC in a few weeks.

I have always considered this to be one of the really difficult designs out there, and yet she did it in just a few hours. I’m glad she doesn’t fold tessellations or I’d be out of a job! 🙂

Artist Olafur Eliasson created this piece, a laser-cut negative space rendering of his house in 85:1 scale:

Your House

It’s made of 454 slices, bound together in a book. Apparently it was quite a difficult process to put together, due to the complex constraints that were put upon the paper. From what I understand it was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.

The folks that produced the book are a laser-cutting house that specializes in paper-cutting, called Visionen in Papier (Visions in Paper). I’m actually even more interested in what they are capable of doing, and the kinds of services they provide- check out some of their other examples of their work.

As this piece combines books, paper cutting, laser cutters, architecture, and paper making, it hits a broad area of things I really enjoy- so I pass it along to you, readers, in the hope you find it interesting as well.

(All images copyright www.kremo.de)

Link from Бунт Архитекторов!, my favorite Russian website!