Origami Tessellations

Been very quiet here as I wrangle some personal and professional monsters. More frequent posting will resume soon. Look for a good writeup on up-and-coming paper artist Jen Stark shortly!

Reposting this short list- it was something I sent to the Origami Mailing List a week ago. Some nice things to admire, and/or be inspired by (or make yourself!)

-Eric

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Not all just origami, but also some paper art and folding architecture things too. The list has been rather quiet lately so here’s some things to look at.

http://revistagalileu.globo.com/EditoraGlobo/componentes/article/edg_article_print/1,3916,516776-2680-1,00.html
A nice article on the mathematics of origami, in Portuguese

http://www.gailbarlow.com/sculptures1.html
Wonderful paper sculptures (lots of sliceforms!) by Gail Barlow (thanks to J. Rutzky for the link)

http://www.foldschool.com
Free foldable cardboard furniture designs for kids

http://www.orangevoid.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=27&Itemid=36
Fantastic tessellated membrane, mechanically controlled for architectural purposes (I dream about this sort of stuff, and here it is in real life!)

http://community.livejournal.com/ru_pop_up/32317.html
Some very nice tessellations on a russian paper architecture site- great curved pieces

http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2006/11/how_to_use_furo.html
great PDF from Japan on Furoshiki, cloth gift wrapping – with lots of styles illustrated

http://www.polyscene.com/
the artwork of Polly Verity, an amazingly gifted paper artist in the UK

http://web.mit.edu/optics/www/origami.htm
Nanostructured origami fabrication and assembly – some great promise here

http://www.origami.no/gallery_menu.htm
gallery of origamic / paper architecture pieces, a wide variety

http://www.flickr.com/photos/83855901@N00/
some new works by Joan Michaels Paque – enormous wall-sized sculptures

http://www.flickr.com/photos/67861823@N00/
Many, many photos of waterbomb-based tessellations, by Ben Parker – tantalizingly part of a lengthy tutorial / write-up

Ben Parker (brdparker on flickr) has posted a great collection of waterbomb tessellations recently- 132 photos, in all! Ben says this is all part of a tutorial/write-up on waterbomb based tessellations, which I am eagerly looking forward to reading.

Quite a few of us on Flickr have been folding all sorts of waterbomb-esque tessellation things in the last few months, although the real breakthroughs with this sort of technique comes from the “flagstone” tessellations of Joel Cooper, who has been creating magnificent works of art in this style for years. It is only recently that others of us have been able to sort out some of the methods of this type of construction, and of course we all seem to have approached it from different ways.

Many of the pieces posted here by Ben are not flagstone tessellations, following the intricate style popularized by Joel (great example here), but instead some interesting 3D pieces that remind me a lot of the work of Polly Verity and Ray Schamp. Also, I see a bit of Frank Van Kollem in some of these pieces, as well. But many are new and different, and resemble nothing I have seen before, and that’s always of great pleasure to me. New works are always wonderful to experience.

Many of the photos are low-res, but that’s the breaks when you’ve got a free account on flickr- sounds like a great opportunity for someone out there to step up and sponsor a Pro account, in my opinion…

If you’re a flickrite, I highly recommend adding Ben to your contacts list, so you don’t miss gems like this when they come along.

-Eric

Here’s a few sample photos:

Ray Schamp gave me a heads up on this – Fredrik Owesen posted a fantastic design, made up of completely random polygons tiled in a flagstone pattern.

This has long been something I have wanted to see, and I am not surprised at all to see it coming from Fredrik- he’s a source of many new ideas, and I know he’s been working a lot of randomized folding in the last few months.

For technical details: I’m just making some guesses here, but I think he used his unique “random folding from base polygons” technique, and then squashed the resulting pleats in half to create double pleats between each polygon. This seems pretty tricky, mostly because generating the twists for such intersections cleanly can be difficult! He alludes to this in the comments, in reference to very small angles, and very large angles (that approach 180 degrees) and how that results in huge triangles that are very narrow, etc.

But my Voronoi tessellation loving heart just can’t get over the beautiful, cellular *randomness* of this design. It’s just wonderful. Thanks so much for sharing this with all of us, Fredrik.

-Eric

I had the great pleasure of finally meeting Ralf Konrad at the 2006 CDO convention in Verbania, Italy. (Actually, going to meet him was the main reason I went there in the first place!)

He posted a great write up of the convention on his site- in German- which I can’t read, and the babelfish isn’t so great at translating. Much thanks to Peter (Syngola on flickr) for translating it to English for us monolinguistic Americanos!

Read the English version on Ralf Konrad’s website. Thanks Ralf! I hope to see you again soon!

Ralf Konrad, myself, and Mélisande at the CDO convention, 2006