The origins of curved-fold origami
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These works often rely on traditional straight folds. But other artists began creating astonishing curved folds. Early examples can be found in the late 1920s among the work of a student of Josef Albers (1888–1976), a painter and teacher at the Bauhaus, the famous Weimar school of architecture that gave rise to an entire artistic movement spanning several disciplines. The resulting piece consists of a disk whose folds form concentric circles, alternating between mountain and valley folds. Once folded, the model naturally assumes the shape of a saddle. The idea was subsequently revisited many times over the years, notably by cutting out the center of the original disk to create a pleated ring that takes on elegant forms.
Thus, in the 1940s, the Museum of Modern Art (New York) exhibited a sculpture by Irene Schawinsky (1903–1990), while in the early 2000s the Japanese master Kunihiko Kasahara (born 1941) published a book entitled Extreme Origami that also takes up this idea.
Where science meets craft
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David Albert Huffman (1925–1999) is best known for his work in computer science. In particular, he created the Huffman codes now used every day for lossless data compression. The idea is based on constructing a tree containing, for example, all the characters used in a text, each assigned a weight according to how frequently it occurs. Each node in the tree then encodes a character, with more frequent characters receiving shorter codes.
