Then, in the 1950s, new techniques and designs created by Japanese origami artist Akira Yoshizawa started being published and exhibited. ![]() ![]() But until the mid-20th century, practitioners had been limited to only a few hundred classic and oft-repeated designs. There was also an independent tradition of paper folding in Europe. No one knows for sure when or where paper folding originated, but it seems to have been well established by the 1600s in Japan, where messages of good luck and prosperity have long been folded into ceremonial pieces. He continued folding, and by the time he graduated from the California Institute of Technology-with a doctorate in applied physics-the art of origami was in a resurgence. "I started wanting to make things that weren't in the books, and at some point began making my own designs," he says. There's essentially an endless supply of raw material."īy the age of 10, Lang had folded flapping birds and jumping frogs, and was running out of published models. "This seemed like such a wonderful thing, that you could take some paper, something free, and make really neat toys out of it. "I remember the moment I started," Lang recalls. Lang first embarked on his paper route at the age of 6, when his father, Jim, a sales and service manager for an equipment company in Atlanta, and his mother, Carolyn, a homemaker, gave their precocious son a book on origami. "When he works on a problem, he usually can see the solution, get out a piece of paper and demonstrate it." "One of the things that's really unusual about him is his intuition for paper and his technical acuity at folding it," says Erik Demaine, an associate professor in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT who studies all types of folding and is a frequent collaborator with Lang. This past September, he organized the Fourth International Conference on Origami in Science, Mathematics and Education, held at the California Institute of Technology. In 2004, he spent a week as artist-in-residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where his lectures drew standing-room-only audiences of paper folders and math and computer-science students. Lang, who has authored or co-authored eight books on origami, has exhibited pieces in art galleries and at origami conventions in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Boston, Seattle and San Diego. Most of these works adhere to one deceptively simple requirement-the use of a single sheet of paper with no cuts or tears. It is so complex that Lang was asked to demonstrate its folding on Japanese television-a task that took five hours. His masterpiece, first created in 1987, is a life-size, 15-inch-tall Black Forest cuckoo clock, complete with pendulum, pine cones and stag's head. Lang has created or breathed life into more than 495 intricate new origami models, some requiring hundreds of folds: turtles with patterned shells, raptors with textured feathers, a rattlesnake with 1,000 scales and a tick the size of a popcorn kernel. His signature is a high degree of reality with a breath of life." His work is very intriguing because he has combined art and math. "A lot of people who come from the science end are mostly interested in origami as a problem to be solved. "He's the Renaissance man of origami," says Jan Polish of Origami USA, which has 1,700 members worldwide. What's more, this group believes the ancient art holds elegant solutions to problems in fields as diverse as automobile safety, space science, architecture, robotics, manufacturing and medicine.Ī laser physicist and former researcher with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Lang, 46, is a pioneer in technical and computational origami, which focuses on the mathematics behind the art. ![]() No longer limited to traditional birds and boats, origami-the art of paper folding-is evolving artistically and technologically, thanks to a small but growing number of mathematicians and scientists around the world, including Lang. ![]() So realistic that some people threaten to stomp on them, these paper models, virtually unfoldable 20 years ago, represent a new frontier in origami. Among the multilegged creatures in Robert Lang's airy studio in Alamo, California, are a shimmering-blue long-horned beetle, a slinky, dun-colored centipede, a praying mantis with front legs held aloft, a plump cicada, a scorpion and a black horsefly.
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