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Material witness

The final cut

Nature Materials volume 14, page 16 (2015)Cite this article

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Origami — the folding of flat sheets — has been a well-advertised approach to engineering structures with diverse properties that can be efficiently and easily collapsed and unfolded1. But there is another constructive paper art in Far East Asia that has received less attention: kirigami, in which paper is cut into intricate patterns. This approach often involves folding too: the archetypal kirigami form is a scene, often a building, made from strips and facets that emerge from the hinge of a folded sheet.

Although kirigami is essentially of Japanese origin, it has long been familiar throughout the world in the form of the snowflake decoration made by folding and nicking a sheet (a method sadly apt to yield snowflakes with four-fold rather than six-fold symmetry). Paper-cut snowflakes — simply outlines rather than genuine kirigami — featured in one of the first serious studies of their forms, Cloud Crystals (1864) by the keen-eyed American amateur Frances Chickering.

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References

  1. Schenk, M. & Guest, S. D. in Origami 5: Fifth International Meeting of Origami Science, Mathematics, and Education (eds Wang-Iverson, P., Lang, R. J. & Yim, M.) 293–305 (CRC Press, 2011).

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  2. Blees, M., Rose, P., Barnard, A., Roberts, S. & McEuen, P. L. Bull. Am. Phys. Soc. 59, abstr. L30.00011 (2014).

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  3. Qi, Z., Park, H. S. & Campbell, D. K. Preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/1407.8113 (2014).

  4. Cho, Y. et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1417276111 (2014).

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Authors
  1. Philip Ball
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Ball, P. The final cut. Nature Mater 14, 16 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat4185

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