of the assignments was to make what I called a “lightbox.” It was a mechanism for capturing light and was made by the students from a single sheet of white Bristol board paper. The sheet size came in 22.5” x 28.5” and they were required to use the entire sheet. Although they were allowed to cut and fold, they could not use any adhesive. Only the folds had influence and stiffened the structure. The students made amazing forms and watched how light behaved without and within. And finally when we unfolded the “lightboxes” to understand the process, the paper recounted to us its memory!
This exercise also introduced the concept of economy of material, of using every part of the sheet—something origami is so rigorous about. As Engel says in his essay, while other art forms are either additive or subtractive, “origami is transformative.” And he rightly, I think, compares this attribute to alchemy, for there is as much material at the beginning as at the end, and so you can go back to the beginning without losing anything. This capacity to create something with care and determination (and no waste) is unique. Without that objective, that intent to create something of consequence, you could just as easily scrunch up the paper and call it abstract art!
The author’s origami Hatching chick, shown at right, and the memory of its folding process, captured in the crease pattern above. The white egg opens to reveal the yellow chick, produced from the opposite side of the paper.
Nondita Correa-Mehrotra
Boston
October 2010
Nondita Correa-Mehrotra, an architect working in India and the United States, studied at the University of Michigan and Harvard. She has worked for many years with Charles Correa Architects/Planners and is also a partner in the firm RMA Architects in Boston.
Correa-Mehrotra has taught at the University of Michigan and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was one of five finalists for the design of the symbol for the Indian Rupee, an idea she had formulated and initiated with the Reserve Bank of India in 2005. She also designs furniture, architectural books and sets for theater, and curates exhibitions.
Preface
Creating the origami designs and thoughts that fill this book has been a personal odyssey spanning two decades. At the time I finished my first origami book, in 1989, I had been creating original origami designs (paperfolders call them “models”) for over 15 years. I was proud of them, but they felt like the work of a child and a student, not someone of the world. Since that time, I have traveled to a dozen countries in Asia, for work and research; traveled the path of marriage and parenthood; and traveled deeply within myself as I questioned the relationships among art, craft, nature, music, and philosophy, and, especially, what this strange art/craft/pastime of origami means to me. These journeys have taken me to a place I consider to be the edge of paperfolding. In this book, I invite you to follow me there.
If you are new to origami, or even if you consider yourself a veteran, be prepared to traverse some very challenging territory. Some of these models are among the most complex ever published. (Although my design aesthetic tries to make a virtue of simplicity, getting to simplicity is often complicated.) Even highly experienced folders may find that it takes more than one attempt to produce a satisfying result. In the Table of Contents, the models are rated in order of difficulty from blue square (intermediate) to black diamond (more difficult) to yellow hazard triangle (can’t say I didn’t warn you).
The models in this book can all be made from commercially available origami paper, such as the approximately 10-inch squares found at arts and crafts stores, although I strongly encourage readers to experiment with larger and higher-quality art paper. Handmade Japanese washi paper comes in a myriad of textures, styles, patterns, and colors, is durable, and if molded when damp (misted with a plant sprayer) or coated with a thin paste of starch or methylcellulose (a safe and readily available thickening agent) retains its shape when dry. Useful tools include a burnisher (any hand-held tool with a flat edge or tip; hardware stores often stock metal ones that resemble dentist’s tools), and tweezers with an elongated tip. To fold a model of a given size, calculate the size of the initial square from the information given on the first page of each set of diagrams.
When you behold your finished models, having completed the long and rewarding journey from step one to the final destination, say a word of thanks to my friend and artistic collaborator Mao Tseng, who transformed my rough hand sketches into the beautifully rendered drawings presented here.
Welcome to the edge of paperfolding!
Given the breath of life by M.C. Escher’s extraordinary imagination, this mischievous reptile aspires to live in three dimensions but is condemned to return to the inanimate tile pattern whence it came.
In Search of Form and Spirit: An Origami Odyssey
Why am I—and why are you, the reader of this book—drawn to origami? There are, after all, more popular arts we could pursue: painting, sculpture, photography, poetry, dance, or music, each possessing a fine Western pedigree. When I was a child of twelve or thirteen, just developing a fascination with paperfolding, I didn’t question what drew me to it. I only knew that with each new figure that formed in my hands (at first other people’s designs, and then my own), I felt the pull of having entered some other, deeper world.
I didn’t have the words then to describe this experience, but today I would say that it involves magic, alchemy, the transformation of something common (a piece of paper) into something rarer than gold—something living, a bird or a beast or a human figure. Some arts are additive: an oil painting is built up stroke by stroke, a musical composition note by note, a work of literature word by word. Others—a woodcut, a stone carving—are subtractive: the artist strips away wood or stone until the desired end state is reached. But origami is transformative. There is just as much material at the beginning as at the end. Unfold the completed origami figure, achieved entirely without cuts, glue, or other impurities, and you return to the original square. If that’s not alchemy, nothing is.
The Dutch artist M.C. Escher, one of my early influences (I remember being mesmerized by a lithograph of his in a magazine around the time I encountered origami), had an expression for what drew him to the tile patterns that he transformed, bit by bit, into representational figures. He called it “crossing the divide,” the divide between that which he called “mute”—meaning abstract, geometric shapes—and that which “speaks,” something living and breathing. Escher’s artistic process gives life, gives breath. The geometric shape turns into a fish, then a swan, flies from the paper, then returns to become a shape once again. Alchemy.
Escher’s philosophical musing has a parallel in a wood-block print by Katsushika Hokusai. In A Magician Turns Sheets of Paper Into Birds (1819), the pieces of paper tossed into the air by a seated magician evolve into a more and more birdlike form until at last they take flight. Hokusai, like Escher, brings the inanimate to life. By crossing the divide in the other direction, however—returning animate forms to their abstract, geometric origins—these artists simultaneously undermine the reality of their creations’ existence. In Escher’s lithograph Reptiles (1943), the lizard that emerges from a hexagon thinks
