A Japanese Pilgrimage
I had already spent a decade creating my own origami figures when, at the age of twenty-three, I traveled to Japan to meet and interview that country’s greatest origami artist, Akira Yoshizawa. (The interview appears in Folding the Universe.) Without Yoshizawa, whose brilliance and fame popularized origami and made it an international art form, folding paper might still be solely the province of Shinto priests, the Japanese aristocracy, and Japanese schoolchildren.
In the style of a young apprentice to an aged sensei, or master (Yoshizawa was then about 70), I drank from Yoshizawa’s pool of ancient wisdom, even as I remained skeptical of his mystical pronouncements. As a recent college graduate on that first trip to Japan, I was seeking life experience, a way of moving beyond the limitations of an insular life spent mostly in studies. Like many young graduates, though, I simultaneously cast a critical eye on patterns of behavior different from my own, and Japanese culture had plenty to critique. The elder Japanese origami sensei whom I met on that visit (Yoshizawa among a half-dozen or so) seemed eccentric in their single-minded devotion to folding paper and narcissistic in their need to surround themselves with true believers who only practiced their particular school of folding. But there was no denying the brilliance and vitality of Yoshizawa’s models and of the man himself (in person, jumping up on a table to retrieve boxes of models on high shelves, or imitating the movement of an octopus, he didn’t seem old at all), and I began to open up to the wisdom he had to offer.
Play is at the heart of every origami design. The sheer delight of bringing a form to life in your hands, common to child and artist, breathes spirit into the creation. When the unconscious takes over, play begins. Forward-thinking educator Friedrich Froebel, the inventor of Kindergarten, understood the value of play in learning and made paperfolding a core component of his curriculum.
Play and tradition merge in this image of a folded crane on a Japanese noren, a cloth hanging.
Years later, I realize that the lessons of that first trip to Japan have never left me. Yoshizawa taught me to listen to nature (water always knows which way to flow); to know both who you are and where you want to go (a compass is no good if you don’t know your destination); to heed the interconnectedness of all things (all living creatures inhale the same air); and perhaps most importantly, always to seek the hidden essence, since what we experience with our senses is just the surface, a thin veneer. It is no stretch to see a connection between Yoshizawa’s Zen musings on the impermanence of all things (among them, paper) and the short-lived earthly existence of Escher’s lizard, with its endless cycle of birth, death by geometry, and rebirth.
I found echoes of Yoshizawa’s deeply felt beliefs in the other Japanese arts and crafts I encountered on my journey, all of which resonated deep within me. Like origami, they cultivate an aesthetic of understatement, of suggestion. Just as a three-line haiku evokes a setting or a season, the glancing stroke of an ink brush potently realizes a craggy mountain peak or an aged hermit, and the placement of a rock and a pond in a Zen garden recalls the universe. It is a short imaginative leap from the rock to a mountain, from the pond to the sea.
The ink on the paper and the rock in the garden appeal to us as beautiful forms, but I have come to realize that what really captivates us is something subtler and deeper—for lack of a better word, their spirit. We sense that there is something mysterious and profound going on, that these forms are really a window to a layer beneath. There is a tenuous balance between form and spirit. If the outer layer takes itself too seriously—believing itself to be too real, like Escher’s all too self-important and too three-dimensional lizard—it risks having its own reality undermined. The gravel and rock garden at Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto is profoundly powerful and suggestive in a way that an American miniature golf course, with its “realistic” miniature buildings and tinted blue waterfalls, is not. Likewise, an origami model that is too real, too exacting, loses the illusion and the charm—and, with it, the alchemy.
I can probably trace to this first journey to Japan my subsequent, lifelong immersion in Asian art and culture. Research and architectural work have since taken me to India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, China, Hong Kong, Myanmar, the Philippines, and back to Japan. I can hear echoes of Yoshizawa’s pronouncements in my fascination with Indian and Indonesian shadow puppets, which come to life only when their shadow is projected on a screen; with the ancient Sri Lankan hydraulic system that irrigated that country’s flat dry zone using gravity alone (a version of which my wife and I employed in our design of a peace center in Sri Lanka); with Indian ragas that can only be performed at dusk; and with Hindu holy verses that cannot be read out loud, only sung.
Crossing the divide, reality and illusion, interconnectedness, hidden essences, impermanence: I was fortunate as a young man to have been exposed to these enduring and challenging concepts by deep thinkers who made them palpable in their art. These are not qualities American culture values or perhaps even recognizes. As I look around at the state of my country today and our effect on the wider world—our obsessive concern for the here and now, our disregard for nature, our inability to recognize the interconnectedness of all living and non-living things—I see the exact opposite of what Yoshizawa was trying to teach, and it is hard not to be saddened. When Yoshizawa died a few years ago, at the age of 94, I felt a great loss, even as I knew that he would have been the first to remind me how brief is our transit here on earth.
Proud as a peacock, origami master Akira Yoshizawa retained his childlike sense of play into his 90’s. Here, in his early 70’s, he shows off one of his favorite origami creations at our first meeting thirty years ago.
An Indian Journey
Following the completion of my graduate architectural training and the publication of Folding the Universe two years later, I took an extended break from paperfolding. Folding the Universe proved to be an exhaustive, and exhausting, summation of my early design work and the concepts that had informed it. At the book’s completion, I found myself at an artistic impasse—not the first, as the book attests, nor the last. The geometric rigor and determinism that had informed my early designs had come to feel vacant and soulless. Like Escher and Hokusai, I had experienced the illusory nature of aspiring to perfection. And while my exposure to Yoshizawa’s artistic philosophy and Japanese aesthetics had reinvigorated me, I had neither the desire nor the cultural background to follow in Yoshizawa’s footsteps.
And then the opportunity arose to travel to India. With the aid of several research grants, my wife, Cheryl, and I spent a year criss-crossing the country as she investigated India’s extraordinary underground buildings and I researched that country’s vernacular architecture, the buildings and places made by ordinary people. As we journeyed through mountains, forest, and desert and from teeming city slums to remote, tiny villages, we were exposed to India’s extraordinary crafts traditions and met some of the country’s finest weavers, woodcarvers, brass smiths, potters, bas relief sculptors (to decorate the interior of a desert house, they mold a mixture of mud, straw, and dung), and makers of leather shadow puppets. The work of India’s craftspeople possesses a rough, elemental power, often revealing the actual imprint of the maker’s own hands.
Craft requires that the maker of an object respect the nature of the materials at his service. The limits imposed by the size, shape, thickness, and texture of the medium inspire the creator of a pot, rug, tool, or origami design to create an object of function and beauty.
A woven wicker ball from Java, Indonesia and a copper and leather “monkey” drum from Patan, Nepal are two of many crafted objects that have inspired my origami designs. They evoke the spirit of play not only in the