Origami Tessellations

Bekah and I are heading to NYC tomorrow morning, to do a little touristing and personal meet-ups before the Origami USA convention June 22-25 at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan.

I will be teaching two classes, one complex class on folding tessellations from this scallop shell unit, and one intermediate class on "tessellation basics". To that end, I whipped together a little booklet covering a few of the basic concepts, using some materials and ideas from my upcoming book. It’s really just a bit of a taste of the topic, but I wanted to help people grasp some of the simple bits, so the class would be a bit easier to teach- teaching is hard work, and I get easily sidetracked.

I will be posting a version of the 8 page booklet online after the convention, once I have an opportunity to shake out anything that the class (or others) feel is a little confusing, needs clarification, etc.

Jamie Kelley of Vancouver helped out enormously by taking my random snippets of text and imagery and wrangling them into a nice collection of pages. Thanks so much, Jamie! I’m very impressed with the final product.

For those of you going to the convention, who might be in NYC ahead of time- if you’d like to meet up for coffee or dinner please shoot me an email at origomi@mac.com, and we’ll see what we can arrange. I’m hoping to spend some quality time talking with other like-minded folders without the crush of the convention atmosphere, so if you’re interested in having a chat let me know.

Oddly enough, I always seem to travel on my birthday- tomorrow I turn 29 years old. The last year seems to have just whizzed past at a rapid pace. What new exciting things will the next year hold? I can’t wait to find out.

UPDATE: You can now download the PDF!

My wife Bekah folded this wonderful model of Tom Hull’s the other afternoon, to display at the OUSA convention in NYC in a few weeks.

I have always considered this to be one of the really difficult designs out there, and yet she did it in just a few hours. I’m glad she doesn’t fold tessellations or I’d be out of a job! 🙂

Artist Olafur Eliasson created this piece, a laser-cut negative space rendering of his house in 85:1 scale:

Your House

It’s made of 454 slices, bound together in a book. Apparently it was quite a difficult process to put together, due to the complex constraints that were put upon the paper. From what I understand it was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.

The folks that produced the book are a laser-cutting house that specializes in paper-cutting, called Visionen in Papier (Visions in Paper). I’m actually even more interested in what they are capable of doing, and the kinds of services they provide- check out some of their other examples of their work.

As this piece combines books, paper cutting, laser cutters, architecture, and paper making, it hits a broad area of things I really enjoy- so I pass it along to you, readers, in the hope you find it interesting as well.

(All images copyright www.kremo.de)

Link from Бунт Архитекторов!, my favorite Russian website!

An alert Flickr friend let me know that my book appeared on Amazon.com:

Origami Tessellations: Fantastic Paper Geometry

 

I’m interested to see it listed, although it’s still in the final stages of layout and all that fun stuff. The “cover” shown is not the final one, but just the mock-up created for the catalog; I don’t know yet what the final cover will look like.

The final ship date is earlier than Jan 1, 2008- I hope, anyway- but nevertheless it’s not that far away, considering how much work still remains to be done on the publisher’s side of things.

Here’s the blurb text from Amazon, which (I’m guessing) is something that was written for the catalog that Lark sends out to all prospective purchasers.

Tessellations—shapes repeated over and over to fill a plane without overlapping—have inspired beautiful art, from intricate tile work to M.C. Escher’s playful graphics. Now, master origami artist Eric Gjerde has produced the same stunning kaleidoscopic patterns simply by folding paper! His awe-inspiring collection—the first of its kind—explores the creative possibilities of origami tessellations. The techniques will captivate anyone interested in papercrafting, mathematics, architecture, and design. Gjerde meticulously walks you through all the key folds and creases. Twenty-five projects are organized by complexity, beginning with the easy-to-learn Tiles Hexagon Tessellation and continuing to more exotic designs, like Arms of Shiva, Field of Stars, and Aztec Twist. Each one appears in extremely close-up photos—sometimes backlit—and an inspiring gallery of breathtaking tessellations by origami artists concludes the book.

So, things are moving along. This is the first visibly tangible evidence I have seen that this whole experience is actually real; it’s kind of strange, to be honest with you. I think when I hold the final result in my hands it’s going to be a very odd moment indeed.

-Eric

UPDATE

The book has changed publishers, and will be re-listed under it’s new ISBN number. Find out more info here!