When I first started designing my own origami models one of my areas of focus was creating polyhedra from a single square. At the time most polyhedral origami was modular, made from lots of little bits of paper folded (usually) into triangles with tabs that fit together. This was not so interesting to me as the single-sheet approach, which no one else was really doing.
When I met John Montroll it turned out he was doing it too, and in fact had just published a book of single-sheet origami polyhedra, the first of it’s kind. I’ve learned a lot from hanging out with John and my polyhedra concepts have advanced considerably. Now John is close to completing his third book on polyhedra, which take things to a whole nuther level. He recently asked me to fold a few of his designs to be used for photos in the book. Here are some pictures I took before I sent them off.
They are made of 12’” squares of Canson paper, which is a thickish art paper that has a really nice color and texture. I’ve been getting more an more into folding with thicker papers these days. For years the prevailing trend in origami has been to thinner and thinner papers for subjects like insects and stuff. But I like thicker papers because the model comes out stronger, more sculptable and more durable, especially if you work with larger sizes. This has also had an impact on my design sensibilities, as I tend to avoid designs that absolutely requite thin paper, such as using lots and lots of internal layers. This also leads to larger, more optimized designs. Of course thick is relative. A lot of these papers are barely thicker than standard office paper, but working on fine details it can feel as thick as cardboard.
John is always very elegant with his paper usage and most of polyhedra are just one layer thick on the facets. So although these are complex models, they came out really well, and very strong. You could probably play hackey-sack with some of them!
