Origami Origins

In recent weeks Vicky Wong and Shelley Fu have been developing an understanding of glass while the rest of us worked with steel, concrete, timber, or masonry. We voted as a studio and selected their glass project as the one that we were most interested in developing as an installation. The overall form and massing technique were derived from the mountain and valley folds inherent in many origami designs. A simple mountain fold involves folding a square of paper in half so that the fold comes towards you like a mountain while in a valley fold the crease is farthest from you. These simple folds allow something as complex as a praying mantis to come from a square of paper. Shelley and Vicky had developed several alternate schemes after developing a rhino script that divided their overall from into isosceles triangles mimicking the shapes created by a pattern of mountain a valley folds. And after a few hours of discussion, we agreed on an overall form. Next we focused on the challenges of fabrication. As actual glass was too expensive to experiment with, we each researched material candidates to build our prototype with. We are currently conducting research on acrylic, polygal, panelite, pressed glass, and fiberglass balancing cost versus material effect. In addition, we are also researching the kind of connections we will use to connect the isosceles triangles in our prototype. Before we build our full scale prototype, our studio is working to build a one to six model out of Masonite to see the effect of the new geometry we designed. Tonight we will focus on constructing this model, so that we can meet our deadline for a complete full scale prototype in two week. Wish us luck as we work out all the design kinks and start our journey through glass construction.