1031: Cubes Tessellation

Looking through my Origami Library, I realised I had bought “Origami Tessellations for Everyone” by Ilan Garibi back as the pandemic hit early last year, and realised I had yet to fold anything from it at all:

Cubes by Ilan Garibi
A field of cubes

Early last year was crazy times – bushfires, floods and then lockdown from Covid-19, this book got buried in my reading pile so it is time to begin the journey of exploring tessellations more formally.

Starting at the beginning, with the “Cubes Family”, this is “Cubes”, a deceptively simple tessellation of twisted cubes. I present the “molecule” – that is the tileable unit:

Cubes by Ilan Garibi Molecule
Cubes “molecule”

Then we move to a simple tile of 2×2 molecules:

Cubes by Ilan Garibi 2x2 molecules
2×2 Cubes molecules

Then scale up – I took an A3 sheet, cut the biggest square I could, then divided into 16ths, and these saw how many molecules I could pack in there:

Cubes by Ilan Garibi development

The grid is punctuated with small diagonals that twist this way then that – adjacent molecules are mirror images of themselves so the interact in controlled ways – After leaving it pegged overnight, the paper has sufficient memory to stay put, but a fine misting of water while pegged would, when dry, re-program the paper to stay put also.

Fun fold, pure procrastigami (which is why I originally bought the book), must do some more.

2 thoughts on “1031: Cubes Tessellation

  1. Interesting how a counterclockwise rotation is balanced with clockwise rotation pattern to allow the paper to assume the shape.

    1. yep, adjacent molecules mirror each other alternating twist direction so the field goes flat – the folds in between are also interesting

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