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Irregular Flagstone Tessellation, by Fredrik Owesen

Irregular Flagstone – Front Originally uploaded by Owesen. Ray Schamp gave me a heads up on this – Fredrik Owesen posted a fantastic design, made up of completely random polygons tiled in a flagstone pattern. This has long been something I have wanted to see, and I am not surprised at all to see it coming from Fredrik- he’s a source of many new ideas, and I know he’s been working a lot of randomized folding in the last few months. For technical details: I’m just making some guesses here, but I think he used his unique “random folding from base polygons” technique, and then squashed the resulting pleats in half to create double pleats between each polygon. This seems pretty tricky, mostly because generating the twists for such intersections cleanly can be difficult! He alludes to this in the comments, in reference to very small angles, and very large angles (that approach 180 degrees) and how that results in huge triangles that are very narrow, etc. But my Voronoi tessellation loving heart just can’t …

Ralf Konrad’s notes from the 2006 Italian origami convention

I had the great pleasure of finally meeting Ralf Konrad at the 2006 CDO convention in Verbania, Italy. (Actually, going to meet him was the main reason I went there in the first place!) He posted a great write up of the convention on his site- in German- which I can’t read, and the babelfish isn’t so great at translating. Much thanks to Peter (Syngola on flickr) for translating it to English for us monolinguistic Americanos! Read the English version on Ralf Konrad’s website. Thanks Ralf! I hope to see you again soon! Ralf Konrad, myself, and Mélisande at the CDO convention, 2006

Ramin Razani’s Livre Anémomètre (Wind Gauge)

Jeff Rutzky sent me a photo and video of this wonderful design by Ramin Razani, which will be appearing in Rutzky’s upcoming book Kirigami (by Barnes and Noble Inc, 2007). I’m a big fan of paper arts, not just origami- and we like to cut paper around our house, just as much as folding it. Ever since we picked up a CraftROBO a few months back there’s been a lot of time wastedwell spent on making paper architecture and other fun things. I’m really looking forward to buying a copy of this book- the patterns I’ve seen so far are just excellent! Check out Jeff’s Flickr stream for more kirigami goodness. For this model by Razani, the best part is the action- I had no idea it would do this! So simple yet beautiful!

Sliceform Torus

I saw this amazing sliceform torus on YouTube, thanks to a link from Jorge Jaramillo (commented on this great set of sliceforms by Joan Michaels Paque.) I shouldn’t be browsing around Flickr, as I’m on a self-imposed Flickr hiatus, but Sunday’s a day of rest, so I treated myself to a few minutes of browsing 🙂 The coolest part of the video is the way the model folds flat and pops back into 3D! The creator of this fantastic sliceform says this, on the YouTube commentary: This torus has been made as a Sliceform. It is a paper model made from two sets of slices of the torus. It folds flat because the intersection of each set of slices acts as a hinge. The slices are cut so that one set includes the Villarceau circles. For more on Sliceforms do a web search with Google. See www.tarquinbooks.com for books of models to cut out and ways to explore the mathematics of surfaces using Sliceforms. Check it out, it’s worth a look. Lots of great people …

Amazing russian origami tessellations

Stop whatever it is you’re doing and go check out these tessellations! http://community.livejournal.com/ru_pop_up/32317.html On the Russian LiveJournal Origamic Architecture group, which includes previous OT fave tekuila as a member… Oh, how much I wish that I remembered more Russian! Time to dig out my dictionaries and brush up, because this LJ group seems to be full of some amazing things! UPDATE: Alex from the O-list helps out, and says: They are all university assignments, some made to original CPs and some to anonymous CPs found in the college. I don’t know what college, but the Chair is of Communicative Design, according to comments. This makes me wonder what kind of classes they are teaching? I would love to take classes like that, for sure…