Lang says it made him feel connected and inspired him to create his own designs. He wrote to Elias and the two started corresponding regularly. When he was in his early teens, Lang got hold of the mailing address for Neal Elias, an insular yet innovative folder who pioneered several techniques, including box pleating. "There was no origami community, no conferences" at the time. Walking down seven flights of stairs (the elevators are out of service), he talks about his interest in folding as a kid growing up in Georgia in the 1960s. For Lang, it's an opportunity to pay it forward. For the average origami enthusiast, the conference is a chance to meet their idols and fold side by side with them. People ask him to pose for pictures and sign copies of his books and models he gamely obliges. When the session ends and classes spill into the hallway, Lang is greeted like a rock star. Art collectors can buy works of his existing designs priced roughly between $200 and $1,500 commissioned works usually run from $500 to $3,000. Lang's paper-folding prowess has brought him high-profile commissions-an American flag for a New York Times Magazine cover, for example, and origami characters and landscapes for Mitsubishi and McDonald's TV ads-and consulting work solving high-tech engineering problems using folding techniques. He also pioneered the use of math and computer science to design origami models so complex and intricate that it seems almost inconceivable that they were once a humble square of paper. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris and the Nippon Museum of Origami in Kaga, Japan, among others. Now widely regarded as one of the foremost practitioners of the modern art form, Lang has published more than 500 original origami designs. The moment he picks up a square of purple paper and begins creasing it in midair, long fingers moving at once with the precision of an engineer and the fluidity of an artist, it's clear he found his calling. A decade ago, Lang walked away from a successful career in lasers and optoelectronics to fold paper full time. People who think of origami as simple paper playthings folded by schoolchildren may be surprised that there's such a thing as a professional origami artist, much less one who's a Caltech- and Stanford-educated engineer and physicist. To the students, it doesn't really matter, though it's Lang they're here to see. The subject of this class, however, is not an insect, killer or otherwise, but a variation on a type of geometric origami called Sonobe. (Photo: Timothy Archibald Crease pattern courtesy Robert J. STRIKING: A 7-inch-long scorpion folded from Korean hanji paper using a technique Lang developed called hex pleating. Beginning in the 1990s, a handful of origami artists started applying mathematical design techniques developed by Lang and others to create ever more detailed and realistic models: insects with six legs, then eight, then extended wings, then forewings and hindwings, and so on. None of the known "bases," intermediate folded forms that might become any of a number of things, could produce both fat bodies and long, spindly appendages. Prior to about the 1980s, origami arthropod designs were thought to be all but impossible. Lang, MS '83, has certainly folded his share of creepy crawlies-a scorpion with stinger poised to strike, a Japanese "samurai helmet" beetle with formidable forked horn, even a pair of mating praying mantises-each from a single sheet of paper. "This could have been a killer insect class," he says drolly. Their instructor for this course, Robert Lang, notes that the turnout is impressive, considering he didn't provide a sample of the model they'd be folding for the display downstairs in the great hall. In one, 20 students ranging in age from 9 to mid-60s wait eagerly, packs of brightly colored paper spread out before them on the long, narrow tables. The late-'50s-era classrooms at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Chelsea, where the conference is being held, are a study in beige, from the linoleum to the walls to the dressmakers' mannequins kibitzing in a corner. Over a muggy June weekend, more than 600 paper-folding enthusiasts from around the globe are gathered in New York for the annual Origami USA conference.
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