Hi Folks, Last week I posted the following in the OrigamiUSA email list but not here. Forgive me if some you read it but perhaps others didn’t. I’d like to remind you of an upcoming great meeting online! See below! Thanks!
Do you know Peter Engel? I do! But perhaps I belong to a generation that is already fading in the air! Well, Peter belong to my generation, too. If you have never heard of his name, perhaps you own his book without knowing the author! (Some people read books and believe they were written in heaven!) For many origami people, “Origami from Angelfish to Zen” is -was- one of our bibles! I can tell you a bit about “my” Peter and book. It’s hard to think of “Origami, from Angelfish to Zen” (although known as “Folding the Universe”) without a whirl of sweet memories. I was in New York. I had won an award given by PNUD (United Nations Development Program) for a series of articles I had written in the Argentine press. It was May, 1993. The award included a trip to New York, to visit the UN headquarters and enjoy the city for seven days! Did I say that origami was my obsession? It had been since I can remember. That trip would allow me to canvas the bookstores for origami books and paper! There was no other place better than New York! (Of course Japan was, but that was out of my imagination and pocket.) I have vivid memories of two books I purchased in that trip: Issei Yoshino’s T-Rex book and Peter Engel’s “Angelfish to Zen”. I felt I had been sent to a new atomic orbital. None of these books were what I used to have in my hands. (In fact, my Yoshino’s dinosaur is still in the making, with a few vertebrae completed and saved in a shoebox. Complex origami is not one of my skills, but fortunately there are other paperfolders such as a young man named Diego Ubal from Uruguay who folded an excellent rendering of Yoshino’s T-Rex which is now on proudly displayed at the Museo del Origami in Uruguay). Back to my foray in New York in 1993… (Did I say that during the trip I met my husband-to-be? Well, that’s for another story!) The other book was Engel’s “Angelfish to Zen”. It was big and thick, and didn’t look like the regular books on origami I had. The book dimension was strange. Even larger than an A4 paper (I was already collecting a lot of papers and worried for the weight in my suitcase). There were diagrams, yes, but what struck my attention was the longest essay on paperfolding I had ever seen! That covered more than 80 pages. And it was not the expected introduction about paperfolding, the notation system, etc. that most books bring. It was a succession of topics, one more interesting than the other, and all seemed related. It definitely didn’t look like a book. It seemed to me like a series of articles more fit for a science section of a newspaper (I was a science writer at that time, so I had developed a sense for that.) At home, I had been reading “Chaos” by James Gleick. Another book that engrossed my interests for writing to the general public. I discovered Mandelbrot’s sets, iterations and attractors, and the expressions of their colorful figures. However, I had never made a connection between chaos and origami but Engel led me to an understanding of what lays in a sheet of paper when we start folding it. What patterns are created and how they relate to each other, and what are the connections with Nature and its underlying math. If that wasn’t enough, he was also talking about M.C. Escher’s designs and the connections with the Moorish patterns that Escher found in Alhambra. And yes, you guessed right!, Engel also found connections between Escher’s patterns and paperfolding. He was not a madman. All made sense. And it required concentration. That was not easy reading. How a mind could have made all these connections? I was marveled. He also made a pilgrimage to Japan (one of the chapters in his book), to meet the master! No less than Akira Yoshizawa opened the door of his house and showed him his treasures, well hidden in a matrioshka sets of boxes where he famously kept his fifty thousand foldings! I made my own calculation. Peter Engel was just two years younger than I. He was so young and had accomplished so much! It took me many months (years, probably) to go through his meandering trails. No wonder he became an architect and professor, he has that kind of mind. So when I began to think about the third anniversary of the museum, I thought of contacting Engel and ask him if he would like to reflect on his seminal book with the distance of fifty years of experience. I was thrilled that his answer was positive, and not only that. He’s really in. He’s eager to join a virtual meeting with all of you, and is looking forward to the event on March 26. I hope you can join us. The event is a fundraiser for the Museum’s program “Fund for the Art”, which helps acquire origami art created by outstanding artists from different countries. And it will be two-folded! Peter will be on March 26. And there will be another lecture by Xiaoxian Huang a week later (April 2), about which I will talk in another email. The cost of the whole event is $10.00 (for both lectures). If you cannot afford but you are interested in attending, please send me an email. The events will be recorded for those who register but cannot attend. I hope we’ll have a good crowd! Peter Engel and Xiaoxian Huang have been working hard on their presentation. They deserve a large audience! Please register soon. I’d like the attendees number raise a bit more! :) Make yourself one of them! To buy your ticket, go to Mixily: https://www.mixily.com/event/1595784226415839614 <https://www.mixily.com/event/1595784226415839614> Thank you very much for reaching down to the end of this long email. I look forward to seeing you at Peter’s talk! Laura Rozenberg Museo del Origami in Colonia, Uruguay
