away as he does in his Bay Area home creating a veritable paper wildlife refuge, is his love of animals.
From the time he was a boy, Lang loved tramping in the woods and inspecting the natural world around him. “Part of my motivation for folding creepy things is that I love the actual subjects,” he says.
Lang’s quest for that indefinable realism has inspired him to create more than 500 original origami designs and eight books on the subject. Each time he finds a flaw in a piece, he goes back to square one and a new opus is born. “Somewhere down the road I’ll see flaws,” Lang says. “It’s usually deep and structural, something that had forced me into a non-optimal representation that somehow got the proportion wrong or was too exaggerated. Then I’ll go back and redesign it in a completely new way.”
But don’t mistake his drive as a meaningless
quest based on vanity — it’s part of his process,
and what he enjoys most about the art of origami.
“I don’t believe there’s perfection in origami,” he says. “If I wait long enough, I’ll see the flaws, and I’ll figure out a way I can do it better in the future.”
That now includes using a laser cutter to score lines
enough to say I’ve got the same number of legs as in paper for far more precise folds — and complicated
a real tarantula. I want you to feel the same thing shapes — than human hands alone can make.
that I feel when I look at one. A certain position of Lang still marvels at the endless possibilities
a flap one way just looks like a crumpled flap, but an uncut square of paper holds. “There seems to
you position it differently and it looks like a leg. be no limit to what can be accomplished, and it’s
That part is much more intuitive — you have to always surprising,” he says. “You’d think that people
know what works.” would’ve long ago figured out all of what could be
Art and science converge organically for Lang, done, but in fact we’re nowhere near the limit. That whose right-brain and left-brain aptitudes perfectly continues to be what’s so wonderful about origami, complement each other. Lang worked as a physicist and conversely, what keeps me going. I love creat-and engineer for many years at both Jet Propulsion ing something new or beautiful and interesting, and Laboratory and Spectra Diode Labs, and holds doz- doing it with such limited materials.” ens of patents in optics and semiconductor lasers.
But it was his knowledge of origami that got him hired to develop an algorithm for airbag design and engineer an expandable space telescope.
What keeps Lang enthralled with origami, toiling
Photography by Jen Siska
How does a small square of paper — flat and flaccid — metamorphose into a lifelike longhorn beetle or red-tailed hawk without a single cut or a drop of glue? In the hands of master origami artist Robert Lang, anything is possible.
Take a close look at Lang’s pieces and you’ll notice not just the accuracy of his renderings — the detail of the tarantula’s exoskeleton, the sharpness of the hermit crab’s antennae — but also the objects’ less tangible character traits.
“One of the things I try to do is capture the
emotional impact of a subject,” Lang says. “It’s not
Tina Barseghian is an Oakland-based freelance writer, contributing editor at ReadyMade magazine, and the author of Get a Hobby! 101 All-Consuming Diversions for Every Lifestyle (HarperCollins), which includes a chapter about origami.
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