The Fitful Flog

We had some email from Marc Vigo this week, which pleased us mightily. Marc is a professor at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia and studies some fascinating stuff that is beyond our abilities to describe: modeling and computational geometry and so on. Very cool. He and his friends in the AEP Barcelona are preparing for an exhibition this coming November and these are some of his models for it:

You can see a green “Stellated Curved Tetrahedron”, a grey variation of the same model (with cones instead of pyramids), a blue “Champagne Flute”, a dark brown J. Moseley’s “Bud”, a white “Triangular Twisted Prism”, a beige “Conical Rings”, and a light brown “Eccentricity”. Last three are my own creations, but as since they are so simple, I think that someone must have already folded something similar before me.

Some beautiful stuff here. I am particularly taken with the gray variation. I immediately folded a couple of these — the model appears to substitute small circles for the hexagons in the Stellated Curved Tetrahedron — and the results are delightful. And I think the two halves fit together better, too.

Marc’s representational work is not too shabby, either. His CPs and diagrams are very readable and I plan on studying them for pointers. And, we note with no small degree of satisfaction, Marc releases his work under a CC Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike license. Yes, open origami. Big thumbs up, Marc.

Of course, I would expect no less from Catalonia, the home of the anarcho-syndicalism I admired so much in my college days. This was before I grew old and cynical — humans are not worthy of anarchy, I know that now. But with mental work and spiritual discipline, we will still be able to share origami. This much, I hope for.