FLOWER TOWER ETUDE
Chris Palmer put tessellation
origami on a whole new plane in the mid 1990's. He's gone way
beyond tilings of the plane. Of all his achievements, the
curiously compelling Flower
Tower has gained a reputation as being not only fiendishly
difficult to fold, but also one of the most compelling models in the
origami
repretoir.
I won't be showing you how to fold a flower tower on this page.
You should seek out Shadowfolds.com, Palmer's commercial website, to
acquire precreased models and a video guide to collapsing the model.
What I have here are two "standard" origami tessellations that are
closely related to the flower tower. The petals going from one
layer of the tower to the next keep exactly the same size as they move
up and down the tower. Thus, the "rolled-up" model is a cylinder.
Here are crease patterns for two different versions: Etude 1 and Etude 2. Etude 1 has been
explored by Kawasaki, and is essentially a tessellation of Bird-bases
(although I prefer to look at them as tessellations of
Frog-bases). Etude 1 also appears in Robert Lang's Origami Design
Secrets as a solution to the napkin problem.
I would never fold either of these tessellations by makeing all the
precreases first, and then atempting a global collapse. make the
underlying grid of creases (a square array for Etude 1 and a triangular
array for Etude 2), and work from the bottom of the tessellation to the
top. You will notice that the folding sequence is very much like
a fancy troublewit ... and that is exactly what these are. If I
had discovered the Flower Tower, I might have named them "Radial
Troublewit Progression." Thank god I didn't!
Here are gratuitous flower tower images of objects I have folded.
I particularly like how different flower towers look if you turn them
inside out. My Christmas tree had a few inside out 6-petal FT's
as quite respectable snowflakes.
