Origami Oppie

I got a curious commission from a European museum, via the Czech Origami Society, to make an origami bust of J. Robert Oppenheimer: the physicist who led the Manhattan Project in the race to develop the atom bomb. He’s been in the public mind lately owing to the film about him starring Cilian Murphy (who has a bit similar facial structure) which I did not particularly like; at any rate all that moviegoers seem to remember is a guy with a wide-brimmed hat. The bust would go into an exhibition that the Czech Origami Society was organizing at the Museum of the South Pilsner Region in Blovice, on the 80^th anniversary of the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which in Japan is typically honored annually by schoolchildren folding origami cranes by the thousands and depositing them as wreaths at memorial shrines, but in the Czech folders’ hands would be given a wider origami interpretation, possibly with darker elements. 

The assignment was not an easy one. I’d worked out a technique for making faces and even full heads from single strips of paper but doing a representation of a particular person is another story entirely. Also, my few previous origami portraits were either flattish or used paper backed by thick aluminum foil; this time I wanted to go with my new 3D head technique that uses pure paper (in fact, 300gsm all-cotton paper), which when stained, wet-folded and let to dry gives a wonderfully luxurious look. Now in theory, with wet-folding you can re-dampen a structure after it’s folded and dried so as to make minor adjustments; in practice the more you do this the more the paper starts looking ‘tired’. Since freshness requires minimal retouching I had to continuously refine the design and rehearse it at various scales until the whole process could be done in one go, probably 7-8 hours folding in full concentration, making no mistakes. Judge for yourselves if I have succeeded. 

My more ambitious plan was to extend the head downward, with a neck and shirt-and-tie: perhaps later the jacket that Oppie almost always wore (and later still somehow the equally ubiquitous pipe or cigarette). This I was not able to do in a large-scale version for the time being, but a small sketch that nicely shows what I mean about keeping surfaces "fresh" is part of what I sent in my packet to the Czech Republic.

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Added 22 May 2025:  The opening.

Shark

 

I designed this shark in mid-August 2024, my only new animal model for that year. It’s an efficient model of about 25 steps that works especially well as a wetfold. Its main distinction is the clean look, the unbroken expanse of skin along its body. A crowdpleaser at the March 2025 OrigamIsrael Convention, I taught it as a dryfold-then-wetfold using the fancy Arches 300gsm all-cotton-rag watercolor paper, in large (58 cm) squares that we colored on the spot. An enjoyable first experience for I think all workshop participants.

The talented Sima Rolnick came prepared—for we’d schemed this in advance—and then and there, out of her modulars and the workshop’s dryfold residuals, assembled this gorgeous pelagic mobile.

And now one of my wetfold sharks is at a museum in the Czech Republic, as part of the Senbazuru exhibition that opens in a few days. More on that soon.

Cheers!

Saadya

Some Basic, Neglected Mechanisms

I've been in this field a long time, mostly on the figurative and sculptural side, but over the years stumbled upon a few simple origami mechanisms that seem to have been overlooked---ideas that someone a hundred years ago really should have thought of, but missed. The tree turns out not to have been picked entirely clean, and it fell to my lot to find a few fruit still in good condition. 

Most of these mechanisms I've written about here on this Blog at the moment of discovery, but not all. You can see these 3 - 4 concepts in the (slightly longish) video below. I showed all of these at the SOG in Innsbruck in 2023 and now there's only one idea of equivalent stature, also from about a decade ago, to disclose at the upcoming Structural Origami Gathering in Tokyo, where I'm headed next month.

Soon, perhaps we'll have more to discuss ...

Cheers!

Saadya

Saadya Sternberg Mechanical and Geometric Origami Discoveries