Last night, I read a great article in the New Yorker about Robert Lang, master orgami folder. I remember folding cranes when I was little with my family and our Japanese exchange students. But this stuff is on a completely different level.
Interesting point from the article & something I never thought about:
Scientists began applying these [origami] folding techniques to anything—medical, electrical, optical, or nanotechnical devices, and even to strands of DNA—that had a fixed size and shape but needed to be packed tightly and in an orderly way.
From Lang’s website (and may I add a serious *DAMN!*):
Black Forest Cuckoo Clock, opus 182
Medium: One uncut 1×10 rectangle of Zanders ‘elefantenhaut’ paper
Composed: 1987
Folded: 1987
Size: 15″
Diagrams: Origami Design Secrets
Comments: This was for a time my most well-known composition and the most complex origami figures around. My first cuckoo clock was fairly plain; my second (unpublished) one was composed after a vist to the Black Forest. For the third design, I came up with this figure, composed and folded in Ludwigsburg, Germany.
I read this too! What a great article. The one that amazed me most was the ship fighting the giant squid — from a single sheet of paper.