Tomoko Fuse

Impressive book with clear instructions and an elegant presentation. The models are organized by method of construction. There are essentially two techniques of construction. One involves flat plates that can be bent and slotted into other flat plates. Generally speaking, the visible part of a plate occupies just one face of the polyhedron. In some case, a unit is only visible as an edge, since its sole purpose is to connect other units. I have not seen this technique in any other origami book. This might be a good approach for molecular origami. The other technique the author uses is the more traditional approach, where a polyhedron can be made of many identical modules that usually occupy a portion of several faces of the polyhedron.

I made the cuboctahedron, which uses the first technique. It was satisfactory, but certainly one of the least ambitious models in the book.

I will attempt more, next time.… (meer)

This is perhaps my favorite origami book. I've made pretty much every model in this book at one point or another. I've got some other unit origami books, but they can't compare to this one. There's nothing more disappointing to the origami enthusiast than completing a big, multi-unit structure with thirty or so individual pieces of paper, only to find out that the big old geometric ball that you just made is structurally unsound, or doesn't even stay together at all. That doesn't happen here. If a design in this book doesn't stay together that well when you assemble all the units, the author tells you so beforehand (there are a couple like this, which the author includes due to their beauty or the ingenuity of their design). I'm an especially big fan of the pinwheel unit that you can see in black and white on the cover of this book. You can make all sorts of geometrical figures with it, like the cubes shown on the cover, but what's especially compelling is that you can connect different units using a variety of different paper joints (you can see the red paper that's connecting the cubes there on the cover). Making unit origami then connecting the units together in interesting ways is a lot of fun. I used to teach my neighbors' children in Mongolia how to make some of these, and they always got a kick out of it. Then they would have something to do when they came over to my ger and wouldn't bother me about letting them play solitaire on my computer. It was a win-win situation for me. I've given a lot of these unit origami creations as gifts, and they're always well-received. Another interesting thing about these designs is that you can often use the units to make a wide variety of three-dimensional geometric shapes. There's a glossary of geometric solids in the back of the book to help you with that. I recommend this book highly to all people interested in origami.… (meer)