it appears completely three-dimensional and palpable, and even gives a little snort—but before long it becomes two-dimensional again and then mutely, and meekly, regresses to the hexagon whence it came. If the lizard isn’t real, how do we know that we are?
In my teens and early twenties, I was captivated by form and pattern, and the origami models I devised during that time aspired to geometric perfection. In my designs from that period, such as a lumbering elephant, a leaping tiger, a prancing reindeer with a full rack of antlers, a scuttling crab, and a sinuous octopus with eyes and a funnel for shooting ink, I strove to discover the seemingly limitless potential contained within a single square of paper. (These models appear in my first book, Folding the Universe.) To generate figures as elaborate as these, I drew on an age-old tradition in paperfolding, adding layer upon layer of complexity to basic forms devised by the two cultures that elevated paperfolding to a high art, the ancient Japanese and the Moors of medieval Spain and North Africa.
The square, with its many symmetries, lends itself to capturing these complicated but ultimately symmetric shapes. I applied geometric operations such as reflection, rotation, change of scale, and the grafting of one pattern onto another to generate complex forms from simple ones. Unfold any of these models to the original square, and the profusion of legs, tusks, antlers, tentacles, and antennae melts back into an orderly, geometric pattern. Indeed, it has to, or the paper would not fold compactly enough to produce so many long, thin appendages. Out of this structural need for efficiency is born origami’s aesthetic of economy. Indeed, the pattern visible in the unfolded sheet is striking and beautiful.
These early models made a virtue of rigor and a kind of determinism. The more the completed design appeared inevitable—the more the entire model appeared to develop from one initial impulse, without a single crease left to chance—the more I prized it. In writing about the virtue of geometric rigor in Folding the Universe, I drew a parallel to the well-wrought piece of Western classical music. The first movement of Johannes Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, which I cited as an example, unfolds inexorably, and thrillingly, from the very first two notes, then develops, recapitulates, and culminates in a shattering climax. It is still a piece I love, and even today, artistic rigor, whether in music, architecture, or origami, exerts an enormous pull on me, and is reflected in some of the models in this book.
Katsushika Hokusai’s wood-block print A Magician Turns Sheets of Paper Into Birds captures the alchemical transformation that takes place in the creation of an origami model.
A Japanese Pilgrimage
I had already spent a decade creating my own origami figures when, at the age of twenty-three, I traveled to Japan to meet and interview that country’s greatest origami artist, Akira Yoshizawa. (The interview appears in Folding the Universe.) Without Yoshizawa, whose brilliance and fame popularized origami and made it an international art form, folding paper might still be solely the province of Shinto priests, the Japanese aristocracy, and Japanese schoolchildren.
In the style of a young apprentice to an aged sensei, or master (Yoshizawa was then about 70), I drank from Yoshizawa’s pool of ancient wisdom, even as I remained skeptical of his mystical pronouncements. As a recent college graduate on that first trip to Japan, I was seeking life experience, a way of moving beyond the limitations of an insular life spent mostly in studies. Like many young graduates, though, I simultaneously cast a critical eye on patterns of behavior different from my own, and Japanese culture had plenty to critique. The elder Japanese origami sensei whom I met on that visit (Yoshizawa among a half-dozen or so) seemed eccentric in their single-minded devotion to folding paper and narcissistic in their need to surround themselves with true believers who only practiced their particular school of folding. But there was no denying the brilliance and vitality of Yoshizawa’s models and of the man himself (in person, jumping up on a table to retrieve boxes of models on high shelves, or imitating the movement of an octopus, he didn’t seem old at all), and I began to open up to the wisdom he had to offer.
Play is at the heart of every origami design. The sheer delight of bringing a form to life in your hands, common to child and artist, breathes spirit into the creation. When the unconscious takes over, play begins. Forward-thinking educator Friedrich Froebel, the inventor of Kindergarten, understood the value of play in learning and made paperfolding a core component of his curriculum.
Play and tradition merge in this image of a folded crane on a Japanese noren, a cloth hanging.
Years later, I realize that the lessons of that first trip to Japan have never left me. Yoshizawa taught me to listen to nature (water always knows which way to flow); to know both who you are and where you want to go (a compass is no good if you don’t know your destination); to heed the interconnectedness of all things (all living creatures inhale the same air); and perhaps most importantly, always to seek the hidden essence, since what we experience with our senses is just the surface, a thin veneer. It is no stretch to see a connection between Yoshizawa’s Zen musings on the impermanence of all things (among them, paper) and the short-lived earthly existence of Escher’s lizard, with its endless cycle of birth, death by geometry, and rebirth.
I found echoes of Yoshizawa’s deeply felt beliefs in the other Japanese arts and crafts I encountered on my journey, all of which resonated deep within me. Like origami, they cultivate an aesthetic of understatement, of suggestion. Just as a three-line haiku evokes a setting or a season, the glancing stroke of an ink brush potently realizes a craggy mountain peak or an aged hermit, and the placement of a rock and a pond in a Zen garden recalls the universe. It is a short imaginative leap from the rock to a mountain, from the pond to the sea.
The ink on the paper and the rock in the garden appeal to us as beautiful forms, but I have come to realize that what really captivates us is something subtler and deeper—for lack of a better word, their spirit. We sense that there is something mysterious and profound going on, that these forms are really a window to a layer beneath. There is a tenuous balance between form and spirit. If the outer layer takes itself too seriously—believing itself to be too real, like Escher’s all too self-important and too three-dimensional lizard—it risks having its own reality undermined. The gravel and rock garden at Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto is profoundly powerful and suggestive in a way that an American miniature golf course, with its “realistic” miniature buildings and tinted blue waterfalls, is not. Likewise, an origami model that is too real, too exacting, loses the illusion and the charm—and, with it, the alchemy.
I can probably trace to this first journey to Japan my subsequent, lifelong immersion in Asian art and culture. Research and architectural work have since taken me to India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, China, Hong Kong, Myanmar, the Philippines, and back to Japan. I can hear echoes of Yoshizawa’s pronouncements in my fascination with Indian and Indonesian shadow puppets, which come to life only when their shadow is projected on a screen; with the ancient Sri Lankan hydraulic system that irrigated that country’s flat dry zone using gravity alone (a version of which my wife and I employed in our design of a peace center in Sri Lanka); with Indian ragas that can only be performed at dusk; and with Hindu holy verses that cannot be read out loud, only sung.
Crossing the divide, reality and illusion, interconnectedness, hidden essences, impermanence: I was fortunate as a young man to have been exposed to these enduring and challenging concepts by deep thinkers who made them palpable in their art. These are not qualities American culture values or perhaps even recognizes. As I look around at the state of my country today and our effect on the wider world—our obsessive concern for the here and now, our disregard for nature, our inability to recognize the interconnectedness of all living and non-living things—I see the exact opposite of what Yoshizawa was trying to teach, and it is hard
