IF YOU ARE LIKE MOST PEOPLE,
THE LAST TIME YOU THOUGHT
SERIOUSLY ABOUT ORIGAMI WAS
IN PRIMARY SCHOOL.
..........................................
In those days, origami was code for a
collection of roughly folded cranes, frogs and
boats that seemed to exhaust the limit of the
form somewhere around the 10th crease. It
was literal child’s play: an antiquated pastime,
useful to fill an afternoon, but little more.
Robert J. Lang is not like most people.
A one-time laser physicist with NASA’s Jet
Propulsion Laboratory, the branch of NASA
dedicated to interplanetary exploration, Lang
found in origami a lifelong obsession, a quest
to find the outer limits of what was possible
with nothing except a sheet of paper, your
ingenuity and the basic laws of physics. Now he
uses those same techniques to solve seemingly
impossible design problems in both origami
and science, from material dynamics through
to solar arrays, airbags and space telescopes.
It’s probably telling that just one year before
he got his first job with NASA in 1988, he had
successfully folded a full-sized Black Forest
cuckoo clock that made him a celebrity in the
origami world. His destiny was set.
Lang first discovered origami at the age of
six, when a teacher gave him a book of crease
patterns after running out of things to teach
him in maths class. He was instantly hooked.
After mastering the basics, he started working
through the origami books at his local library.
His parents, spying an interest, would buy
him even more books for Christmas and
birthdays. “It was something that fed on
itself,” Lang says. “The beauty was that I never
needed anything more than just a sheet of
paper and my own fingers.”
By the time he was 11, the lanky Georgian
had come up against the limits of the origami
publishing world – at least as it existed in the
public libraries of America’s south. Starved
of new designs, he decided to see whether
he could make something himself. This is
what might be called a threshold moment.
“The joy of following instructions to create
something gave way to the joy of creating
something truly new that had never been done
before.” Over the following years he worked
out how to fold Jimmy Carter, Darth Vader,
a nun, a rabbit. But there was still a sense of
something missing: a feeling that when it
came to origami, he was still only scratching
the surface. Indeed he was.Origami is, at its most basic level, the art
of taking a single, uncut sheet of paper and
folding it into a three-dimensional shape.
The first recorded references to origami can
be found in the late 17th century, when folded
butterflies became a popular gift during
Japan’s Edo period. But while the practice
became increasingly widespread in Japan
over the following centuries, origami has, for
much of its history, been an art form defined
by its limits, both geographic and functional.
Largely unknown in the outside world until
Japan reopened its borders in the mid-1800s,
the craft had remained static for hundreds
of years, the range of acceptable models set
and the maximum number of folds hovering
around just 30.But the 20th century witnessed two waves
of innovation. The first was driven by the
grandmaster Akira Yoshizawa, the father of
modern origami, who by his own estimation
created more than 50,000 new designs in
his lifetime. The second and more profound
transition occurred in the 1980s, when a group
of practitioners, with Lang at the helm, began
looking to mathematics for inspiration. “People
often think that origami was disrupted by
computers,” he explains. “But it wasn’t; it was
disrupted by mathematics. Computers just let
us realise what the maths told us was possible.”
People quickly discovered there were certain
formulas and algorithms you could apply to
achieve shapes once thought impossible.Insects, long considered impractical because
of their spindly, multi-segmented legs, sprang
into being. Spiders followed, as did scorpions,
ants, hermit crabs and the entire arthropod
family. Complex tessellating shapes and
three-dimensional polygons arose, one after
the other. Designs grew to a state of mind-
numbing complexity. Where 30 was once the
upper limit, now the most advanced pieces
sported hundreds of folds, taking their creators
hours upon hours of careful endeavour. The
pace of progress hasn’t let up since. “The
things we’re doing today would have been
unheard of 10 years ago,” Lang says. “And the
things 10 years ago would have been thought
impossible 10 years before that. It’s like the
progression of what we’ve seen in computers,
where the passage of a decade is enough to see
a revolution in the field.”>>