years ago, at the age of 94, I felt a great loss, even as I knew that he would have been the first to remind me how brief is our transit here on earth.
Proud as a peacock, origami master Akira Yoshizawa retained his childlike sense of play into his 90’s. Here, in his early 70’s, he shows off one of his favorite origami creations at our first meeting thirty years ago.
An Indian Journey
Following the completion of my graduate architectural training and the publication of Folding the Universe two years later, I took an extended break from paperfolding. Folding the Universe proved to be an exhaustive, and exhausting, summation of my early design work and the concepts that had informed it. At the book’s completion, I found myself at an artistic impasse—not the first, as the book attests, nor the last. The geometric rigor and determinism that had informed my early designs had come to feel vacant and soulless. Like Escher and Hokusai, I had experienced the illusory nature of aspiring to perfection. And while my exposure to Yoshizawa’s artistic philosophy and Japanese aesthetics had reinvigorated me, I had neither the desire nor the cultural background to follow in Yoshizawa’s footsteps.
And then the opportunity arose to travel to India. With the aid of several research grants, my wife, Cheryl, and I spent a year criss-crossing the country as she investigated India’s extraordinary underground buildings and I researched that country’s vernacular architecture, the buildings and places made by ordinary people. As we journeyed through mountains, forest, and desert and from teeming city slums to remote, tiny villages, we were exposed to India’s extraordinary crafts traditions and met some of the country’s finest weavers, woodcarvers, brass smiths, potters, bas relief sculptors (to decorate the interior of a desert house, they mold a mixture of mud, straw, and dung), and makers of leather shadow puppets. The work of India’s craftspeople possesses a rough, elemental power, often revealing the actual imprint of the maker’s own hands.
Craft requires that the maker of an object respect the nature of the materials at his service. The limits imposed by the size, shape, thickness, and texture of the medium inspire the creator of a pot, rug, tool, or origami design to create an object of function and beauty.
A woven wicker ball from Java, Indonesia and a copper and leather “monkey” drum from Patan, Nepal are two of many crafted objects that have inspired my origami designs. They evoke the spirit of play not only in the finished products but also in their creative design and skillful execution.
Meeting these artisans allowed me another opportunity to reflect on the craft of origami and how it had come to be practiced in the United States. The passion, artistic vision, and technical refinement that Indian craftspeople bring to their work are the outcome of centuries-old traditions passed down by word of mouth from father to son and mother to daughter. Each piece of craftsmanship expresses a culture’s repository of religion and folklore while simultaneously allowing the artisan a limited amount of freedom to explore his or her own creative ideas. And while the created object is ornamental and decorative, it is also practical: something to be worn, to carry food or water, to create music (the ghatam, an ancient south Indian instrument, is a specially fashioned clay pot), to serve in a religious ceremony.
The same could certainly be said of Japanese crafts and of origami as it was practiced in Japan for most of a millennium. But when Westerners took up origami around the middle of last century, they chose to appropriate the technical rather than the cultural aspects of Japanese folding. Such uniquely Japanese traditions as the thousand cranes, the Shinto shrine, the tea ceremony, and the strict master-disciple relationship meant little to the new self-made folders of the Americas and Europe; instead, they seized upon the geometry of the kite base, fish base, bird base, and frog base as if it had always been their own. Western paperfolding began with a powerful set of mathematical relationships but little or no cultural tradition in which to ground them.
I came to realize that my own origami designs fell squarely in the middle of this traditionless Western tradition. Unlike Japanese origami or the crafts I encountered in India, most of my early creations had no historical origin, no set of cultural associations, and no utility: they were objects to be seen, not used. They arose not from a collective, cultural wellspring but rather my own, individualized response to principles of geometry and to creatures that I had seen only in aquariums, zoos, or—stuffed—at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. (In India, the depictions of tigers, elephants, and monkeys are often based on encounters in the wild.) Whatever aesthetic delight my creations afforded the viewer arose from their finished form and the technical ingenuity required to fold them, not from a shared, empathic relationship between the viewer and the creator.
Typical New Yorkers are oblivious to origami design on phone booth.
Memories of my childhood in New York state brought to life these three scenes of Montauk Lighthouse, the Adirondack Mountains, and a Sailboat in a series I designed for the New York State Department of Tourism. The finished versions were folded from the tourism brochure, and photographs of the models appeared on telephone booths and billboards throughout New York City. The lighthouse cottage appears in this book.
Seen in perspective, the mountains reveal the irregular crags and promontories, the order mixed with improvisation, of their counterparts from nature. They employ a spiraling sequence of closed-sink folds that avoids unnatural-looking horizontal or vertical creases. The folds are similar in shape, but because they rotate and reduce in size with each turn, no two faces of the mountain are the same, and the resulting origami models appear natural and asymmetric.
Many of my earlier models exhibit a high degree of symmetry. The pattern of creases in my model of an Elephant reveals mosaics of repeating shapes. The taut geometry reflects an efficient folding process, necessary to achieve the elephant’s pointed tusks and tapered trunk (with tiny “fingers” at the tip).
A Mysterious Affinity
Along with Indian crafts, I found myself deeply influenced by Indian music, from the classical ragas I heard performed by renowned musicians such as L. Shankar and Zakir Hussain in a Mumbai concert hall to the powerful, rough-hewn folk music I heard sung by the goat- and camel-herders of the plains and deserts. Classical Indian music has a completely different quality than most Classical Western music. Often meditative and dreamlike, it can give the sense of being in motion without going anywhere. Evoking the paradox of the raga’s journey, the Indian music critic Raghava R. Menon writes in Discovering Indian Music, “Its possibilities are infinite and yet it always remains unfinished. Its ending is always a temporal ending . . . In the immediate present, there is no perfection, no consummation, nothing is finished . . .We can see the invisible in it, laden with mystery and revelation, candidly open in its transit . . . It does not want to get anywhere. It just takes place.”
In contrast to the perfection and inevitability of a piece of Western classical music like Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, whose entire score is written out note by note for the musicians to perform, an Indian raga is always improvised. A raga begins with the sound of a tanpura, or drone. There is as yet no rhythm,
