Origami on Steroids
I read a fascinating article the other day in the New Yorker called The Origami Lab, by Susan Orleans. The article focuses on Robert Lang who oversaw R&D at JDS Uniphase until he left in 2001 "to fold paper full time." If you're like me and haven't been keeping up with Origami in the last 30 years you'll be blown away by what people are making out of one sheet of paper these days. Check out some of these creations by Lang and the associated "crease patterns."
You should really read the whole article so to entice you here are a few interesting the tidbits:
- The creation that put Lang on the international origami map was a life sized origami cuckoo clock which took six months to design and six hours to fold.
- In the '70's he invented an origami Jimmy Carter, a Darth Vader, a nun, and an inflatable bunny.
- He is the creator of TreeMaker, origami software available for Mac, GNU/Linux and windows.
- Some of the book titles mentioned that I found intriguing were: "Multimodular Origami Polyhedra: Archimedeans, Buckyballs, and Dualtiy" and "Jewish Holiday Origami."
- Among others, Lang was hired by The Drew Carey Show to create a life-size Drew Carey and by Lawrence Livermore Labs
to work on a folding problem for a "telescope with a lens a hundred metres
in diameter which had to be packed into a rocket so that it could be
sent into space."
A whole world I never knew existed!
Pau for now...
