Year: 2017

Photos from International Summer School Bernau – Preliminary Course

I had a fabulous time teaching at the International Summer School Bernau, at the famous Bauhaus Denkmal Bundesschule Bernau in (wait for it) Bernau, Germany. It was an eye-opening experience and a real joy to teach something new to both the attendees and to people from the local public. More on this to come, but here’s some photos of the experience, compliments of the talented photographer Victoria Tomaschko.

Josef Albers teaching paper folding

Teaching at the International Summer School in Bernau

I am teaching a Preliminary Course for the next two weeks at the International Summer School at the Bauhaus Denkmal Bundesschule Bernau, in Bernau bei Berlin, Germany. Very excited to be doing a specific program focusing on the teachings and instruction of Josef Albers (pre-eminent teacher at the Bauhaus, and later the Black Mountain College in N.C. and then Yale). I’ve been studying his works and historical materials for several years now, and it intersects nicely with my origami work. Most of my classes and instructional sessions over the last few years have centered around the work of Albers, so actually teaching his material in a Bauhaus-built school feels like everything coming full circle. Here are more details on my Preliminary Course program; I will post images from the event later on and share the booklet I have created for the course as well. My morning sessions are open to the public, from my understanding, so if you are in the Berlin area and have an interest in folding some Bauhaus creations, please do come …

Voronoi tessellations and origami

http://news.mit.edu/2017/algorithm-origami-patterns-any-3-D-structure-0622 Some amazing work from the extremely talented Tomohiro Tachi, together with Erik Demaine, our origami community’s resident origami genius. While we’ve long watched and admired Tomohiro’s work with Origamizer (rendering 3D models as crease patterns using some complex mathematics) it appears they have taken this further to help simplify the process as much as mathematically possible. That’s a pretty huge step and has lots of ramifications for the future. Tomohiro’s work uses Voronoi tessellations in it’s calculation of things – that’s one of the underlying principles behind topological manipulation of polygons on a single surface, when calculating pleats and folding – so as an aficionado of this process, I’m happy to see this coming to real fruition.