Looking Outwards – 02

Origami is the art of paper folding. Erik Demaine is a MIT professor and he has been super fascinated by origami folding and now curved paper structures. Under a collaboration with Tomohiro Tachi, Demaine incorporated his algorithms into Tachi’s Origamizer (2008), a freeware that generates origami to innovate new methods to create more complex origami that hadn’t been done before. They had a concept that proved any 3D object can be made from a single piece of paper. The computational process of turning that concept into reality took about 10 years since there were a lot of holes to patch and improvements to be made. Testing out the origami in reality was also a challenge since they had to take materials into account. These studies had a lot of future potential that can be applied to architecture on how complex buildings can be built using cheaper sheet material. I thought this project was interesting because I had to do a studio project that used origami folding and it was hard for me to visualize certain folds/shapes onto the software I was using. I also had a lot of problems with making the models from them because it wouldn’t bend the way I wanted it to. From what I learned, I can probably tell that the algorithm that he used, had to do with a lot of the adjacent vertices, edges, and also the movement along the folds.

Origami – Frederick Blichert on This Computer Scientist Can Turn Anything into Origami