Peter Engel Origami Patterns

The Chinese invented the paper folding art of origami over 1000 years ago, and they endowed it with the aesthetic principies that are at the heart of their culture. As Peter Engel, an American master of the art, says, "the success of a completed figure depends on the creator's eye for form—is it a mere likeness of the original, or does it delve deeper into the form's essential character?" [Engel, 1988]

Engel points out that origami has been taken up in this country by mathematicians rather than artists. He says: "To the mathematician, the beauty oforigami is its simple geometry. Latent in every pristine piece of paper are undis-closed geometric patterns, combinations of angles, and ratios that per-mit the paper to assume interesting and symmetrical shapes."An origami figure always begins with a single square piece of paper. Only folding, with no cutting or pasting, is permitted.

in: Jay Kappraff (1990) Connections. The geometric bridge between art and science.