The Origami Forum

my semi-regular search of Amazon turned up this:

Twists, Tilings, and Tessellations

I've just recently started folding flagstones after stumbling on the fantastic flickr galleries of Eric Gjerde and Joel Cooper. They look so impressive (theirs, not mine) but finding a folding method is proving quite difficult. I can only hope Lang's book will help - he seems adept at coming up with ingeneous folding sequences - and I haven't seen many tessellations with closed sinks!

Actually I see that Robert lang has two new books listed on amazon - the already mentioned Tesselations book and one called "Origami 4".

What I find intriguing is the price of each ($60 and $59) suggesting that these are more than the usual collection of diagrams (for comparison La Fosse's soon to be released book is listed on Amazon at $16). Are we in for a couple of more "Magnum Opi" along the lines of ODS?

His recent vases/goblets and works of this nature no doubt feature in the Twists and Tesselations book but does any one have any more info on "Origami 4" (could they be the same book and this is some error by Amazon)?. Certainly I hope to see some of his displayed models such as the Crow, Elk or Goliath beetle.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Origami 4 is going to be a reprint of the rare(ish?) book by Robert HARBIN, not Lang. From memory it will be hardcover, which might explain the price.

I've got my old paperback Origami 4 on the shelf from when I was a kid - I found it in a charity shop for 20p, didn't realise it was a collectors item until recently. The pages are pretty brown but at least they're not stuck together with jam!

I'd assumed Lang's tessalations book would be of similar scope to ODS, given the price, i.e. lots of mathematical discussion on tesselations and such, with plenty of crease patterns. At least thats my hope, as an engineer but there isn't any info out there yet, that I can find.

The Origami 4 book by Lang should refer to the Proceedings of the 4OSME Conference, since that book has been long in coming, and the same publisher is listed in both Amazon and Lang's website:
http://langorigami.com/science/4osme/4osme.php4

Good catch with 4OSME. And, If I remember correctly, Robert said that publication of the Tessellations book in 2008 was a bit optimistic.

FWIW, the Harbin Origami 4 book is sometimes available on the Web from used bookstores. However, the name may be wrong, so go by the ISBN.

- Hank Simon

It is indeed the proceedings of 4OSME. And he's working now on another ODS-type book on geometric/abstract/curved folding, which I'm very very excited about! He mentioned something about freeing up a lot of his schedule this year to work on it, so let's hope we see it sometime in early 2010. That would be wonderful. ODS is what really got me folding seriously, so I'm a little scared and excited about seeing a monster tome all about geometric folding... I'll probably vanish for a month, folding madly, coming out for air and band-aids for all the paper cuts :)

Aces 21-Lang's book won't be out for awhile at least that is what he said this fall when I asked him, although I am looking forward to it.

There are quite a few with closed sinks it just isn't always obvious unless noted. In fact if you take a tessellated square twist tessellation and close sink around the squares you end up with a form of a corrugation that is like Momatani's Wall(hinged style or not) However not a corrugation as defined by Ray Schamp, but a different varient of a corrugation tessellation.

Thanks Christine. I've only recently realised that Amazon appear to be somewhat optimistic about release dates. I'll look forward to seeing the book when its done, but won't hold my breath. On the plus side, I get longer to save up for it!

It never occurred to me there could be such a thing as sinks in tesselations. Everything I've seen and played with so far has been of the pre-crease then twist/squash variety. But since you mentioned it, I folded up a quick (and messy) square twist tess from printer paper, sunk it a bit, and voila:




Now this is cool for a number of reasons. It puts the twists inside the structure, so you can't see the construction externally, and that makes it iso-area, which I also like.

One reason it is not cool is that I took the picture with my phone, which is old and low res, so apologies for the terrible image.

Thanks for a fun lunchtime!

And there you have rediscovered Momotani's wall, though through a different procedure. Also, if ever you get deep in to origami tessellations, this is of the "flagstone" variety.