Novel#2
Name:Nur najmina binti mohd jelani
Class:2Al-biruni
College number:13114
Title:The origami lab

The Origami Lab by Susan Orlean

  Most combatants in the Bug Wars - which were origami contests - weremembers of the Origami Detectives, a group of artists in Japan who liked to tryoutdoing one another with extreme designs of assigned subjects.He had been doing origami - that is, shaping sheets of paper into figures, usingno cutting and no glue - for twenty-five years and designing his own models fortwenty.He would have liked to have folded insects in those years, bugs, as well ascrustaceans, were still an origami impossibility.

   In 1970, no one could figure out how to make a credible-looking origami spider,but soon folders could make not just spiders but spiders of any species, withany length of leg, and cicadas with wings, and sawyer beetles with horns.On one side of the desk was a stack of thin, square sheets of Japanese origamipaper, as brightly colored as a roll of Life Savers."So I did more origami. It was a release from the pressure of school. I'd foldthings, record the design, and then throw the model away." He had never metanyone else who did origami, and he didn't tell people about his pastime.

  Through the group, which is based in New York and now has close to twothousand members, Lang met other recreational folders and also people knownin the origami world as "Masters," including Michael LaFosse, John Montroll,Joseph Wu, and Paul Jackson."John has done models in origami of all the Archimedean solids! All the Platonicsolids! All the Johnson solids!" Lang said excitedly.
While in Germany for postdoctoral work, he and Diane were taken with BlackForest cuckoo clocks; the carved casings, pinecone-shaped weights, pendulums,and pop-out birds wouldn't seem to be a natural for origami, but Lang thoughtotherwise.

  The kindergarten movement was embraced around the world, including inJapan, where Frobel's simple folds merged with traditional origami.He published several while he was still in the laser world, starting with "TheComplete Book of Origami," in 1989, but he knew that it would require all histime to write the one he had in mind, which, instead of providing patterns forfolders to follow - the typical origami book - would teach them how to designtheir own.The first part of his plan was to write the book he'd been contemplating whilestill at JDS Uniphase - "Origami Design Secrets," which was published in 2003and lays out the underlying principles of origami and design techniques.

  He recently designed toilet-paper origami animals for a Febreze commercial,which were folded by a fellow origami artist, Linda Mihara, and last year, againassisted by Mihara, he created an origami world - forest, fields, deer, Victorianhouses, a dragon - for a thirty-second Mitsubishi spot.Lang had designed it with software he started writing in 1990 called TreeMaker,which is well known in origami circles; it was the first software that wouldtranslate "Tree" forms - that is, anything that sort of resembles a stick figure,such as people or bugs - into crease patterns.

  Brian Chan, a Ph. D. candidate in fluid dynamics at M. I.T., told me recently, "That was a huge lecture. It got everyone talking." It inspired Chan to put hishobby of blacksmithing on hold and take up origami; he and Lang are nowregular participants in an annual competition that is a friendly continuation ofthe Bug Wars.In Japan, the "Survivor"-style show "TV Champion" has often featuredcontestants engaging in extreme origami - folding with their hands in a box, orwhile balanced on stools with the paper suspended above them, or whilesnorkelling in a fishtank.

  A surprising number of countries have origami organizations; the OrigamiSociety of the Netherlands has more than fifteen hundred members - probablythe highest per-capita membership in the world.Origami as therapy has its proponents: in 1991, at the Conference on Origamiin Education and Therapy, a mental-health professional presented a paperdetailing her origami work with prisoners.

  A few people were working from a book titled "Multimodular Origami Polyhedra:Archimedeans, Buckyballs, and Duality"; another group was flipping through"Jewish Holiday Origami"; and a retired computer engineer named JohnAndrisan was creating a bra out of a dollar bill to illustrate a story he was tellingabout a lunch he once had at Hooters."Madam," he chided one of the students, "You may know how to handle men,but you don't know how to handle paper." During a break, I asked the instructor how long he had been doing origami, and he said, "In 1986, I lost my son, I got divorced, my life ..." He stopped and winced.

Older Post | Newer Post