Lord of the Folds

What one man can do with one sheet of paper

Reported by Brian Fisher Johnson
Produced by Sarah Delia and Brian Fisher Johnson

At OrigamiUSA’s annual convention in New York City, visitors can see figures thousands of folds beyond traditional cranes. A chessboard complete with pieces, a monster squid attacking a sail ship, all folded from single sheets of uncut paper.

Such feats of folding might come as a surprise, considering origami’s association with arts and crafts. But one of the convention’s attendees is changing that image. His name is Robert Lang.
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No Limit to What Was Possible

Mild-mannered, with a button-down shirt and neatly trimmed beard, Lang is considered a revolutionary in origami design. Until the early 1990s, folders still struggled to capture certain details in their creations. Subjects like insects with all their legs, antenna, and wings proved difficult to fold from one piece of paper.

But Lang and other origamists discovered a method for folding those insects. They map out where they want to fold legs, antenna, or other details by drawing circles, squares, and hexagons on a flat sheet of paper. Map out the shapes correctly, Lang said, and creating that insect is simply a matter of folding on the lines. Lang found that he could fold just about anything with his new technique, like deer with all their antlers and even scorpions with anatomically correct legs.

“There seemed to be no limit to what was possible,” Lang recounted.

Lang said he became so confident in his folding skills that he even left his engineering career to open his own origami studio. And business is apparently good: a single-sheet model Lang folded — of a female praying mantis eating a male praying mantis — sold for thousands of dollars.

Origami in Space

Ten years ago, Lang was approached by a government-funded laboratory looking to solve an engineering snag. The lab wanted to place a high-resolution telescope in space. But to get there, the lens (as wide as a football field) needed to fold down into a rocket shaft (only a few yards wide).

The laboratory wanted to know: could Lang come up with a folding pattern that was both simple and compact? Lang went to work. He built a paper model of the lens and began experimenting with folding patterns. After hitting on a few possible designs, Lang took his paper models to the laboratory for demonstration.

The lab settled on a model called “the umbrella.” “It worked similarly to a collapsible umbrella, in that you had rings that started as a cylinder and opened out into a flat shape,” Lang said. His folding pattern was then translated to test models that used hinges between separate glass panes.

Budget cuts prevented Lang’s design from ever reaching football field-sized proportions, but a smaller version of the “umbrella” was successfully tested on land, he said.

Still, origami-related projects have multiplied, from designs for unfolding “stents” that expand clogged arteries to computer simulations for flattening airbags.

“There’s 30,000 origami designs in print,” Lang said. “And yet we still don’t seem to be at the limit of what’s possible both technically and artistically from a single sheet of paper.”

By the looks of things, it’s apparent that new uses for origami will continue to unfold.