Robert Lang Folds His Way To Fame
The story was originally broadcast on May 20, 2007.
Origami comes from two Japanese words: Ori, for paper, and gami, to fold. Take one sheet of paper, fold it without making a tear and create a design. People young and old have been doing it almost since paper was invented.
Now meet Robert Lang. When he folds paper, he doesn't just make objects, he creates art. He's able to see paper differently than the rest of us.
"When I look at it, I can see that it could potentially be made into a lot of different things," he told Sunday Morning correspondent Serena Altschul.
He can make nearly anything, a flag, a moose, and his favorite animal to make — the koi.
"It was particularly difficult," he said. "Just the folding of the scales alone took eight hours of solid folding."
Lang lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and creates his work in this backyard studio. He started making origami as a kid in Georgia, then kept it up while studying at Cal Tech, but told no one, not even his then-fiancée, Diane.
"And I was in his apartment and saw these amazing little bugs on the shelf. And I said, 'Where did you get these?' He said, 'I made them.' I said, 'No, you didn't. Human hands can't do that.' And then he told me about his hobby," she said.
But Diane wasn't the only person who noticed. Soon Lang's work was being published and even exhibited in museums. At the same time, his career as an engineer and physicist was taking off. Lang holds 46 patents and is editor of The Journal of Quantum Electronics.
His knowledge of math even helped him create something revolutionary: computer programs that help design origami.
"Eventually I got my computer program to the point that it could actually find things that I couldn't figure out for myself with pencil and paper," Lang said. "And at that point, I realized that kind of a threshold had been crossed."
Lang has been doing origami full-time for seven years now. He creates not only for collectors but corporations, like his commercial for Mitsubishi: The entire background was origami he made.
"The mountains, the leaves, the trees," he said. "There's probably a couple hundred trees in that. The animals were computer animated to make them move. But we folded the bridge, skyscrapers. These buildings are about eight feet tall. And then a row of houses. So we had to put an immense amount of detail in everything."
Lang hasn't left his former life completely behind. He collaborated on the design of a satellite telescope mirror that, when built, will be larger than a football field. Lang used his origami skills to figure out how to fold that giant lens to fit inside a rocket.
And sometimes he gives live performances. For one at the Mingei Museum in Escondido, Calif., he started with this big blank piece paper and then folded and folded and folded. As the paper got smaller and smaller and smaller, it eventually became a dragon.