Origami Cartoon Crane — Station Plaza Sculpture, Hiroshima

This is the one piece in the whole portfolio where the object is already a sculpture before anybody makes it. An origami crane is a folded sheet of paper, and the brief was to make one that would stand on a station plaza for twenty years.

Cast, not folded

The crane is hand-laminated fibreglass, not folded sheet, and the whole job turned on making that invisible. There are 31 visible creases. Every one of them is a real edge in the mould, cut at the true dihedral angle of the fold rather than being sanded in afterwards, because a crease that is a groove instead of an edge catches the light in the wrong way from every angle except one.

Paper behaviour at two metres

Real folded paper is 0.1 mm thick and holds a crease because the fibres have yielded. Scaled to 2.2 m, that same geometry would be 55 mm thick and would read as machined plate. The shell is therefore 8 mm to 14 mm, which is about the thinnest hand-laminated shell that survives a person leaning on it, and the fold lines were sharpened slightly beyond true so that they still register at ten metres.

Two small lies

The first is the eyes. Folded paper has none, and the piece has two plain ovals, because without them the object reads as a bird-shaped object rather than as a character. The second is one folded panel across the left wing, in indigo, which is not part of the standard fold at all. Both were approved by the client in the same meeting and both are the reason the piece is remembered.

On the plaza

It stands at 2.2 m between the concourse doors and the taxi rank, where every departing passenger walks past it, facing slightly back towards the doors so that it is met head-on on the way out. The authority’s note on what happened next is in the panel above.