890: (340/365) Arches Tessellation

David Huffman is a bit of an origami enigma it seems – he pioneered a bunch of tessellations and surface corrugations and seems to be one of the first to explore curved creases and their bizarre effects on flat sheets:

This is is “Arches” tessellation, an intriguing offset brick valley folded grid that then has parabolic mountain folds at each intersection. The resultant sheet is really hard to tidily collapse (in my experience) – perhaps it was the paper or the scoring technique I used to form the parabolas, or perhaps it was the parabola itself – with no guidelines I just sort of guessed a curve.

You get a sort of waterbomb base forcing one trough deep into the arch of an adjacent fold – when it is tidied up it is fascinating – I could see uses for this as an interesting textural pattern or ambient light panel as it makes funky patterns when backlit.

This has been in my “must try” pile for ages and I have a few more curved fold ideas to play with also.

I cut a parabolic template based on the size of the grid I free-formed from regular divisions. I think the trick is to sharpen up the curves without unduly distressing the other surfaces, then you get this delicious waveform. Fun fold.

2 thoughts on “890: (340/365) Arches Tessellation

  1. Love love love it…I didn’t realise some Tessellation used tools and templates..I think you’re onto something

    1. pretty sure all curved folding routinely used scoring tools (or laser etching) and it would be mad not to use templates to ensure uniformity of curve forms

Leave a Reply to wonko Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.