Modular Kirigami

George W. Hart

These are sculptures I made by assembling identical pieces of paper which have been carefully cut to precise shapes.

As of this writing, Google reports over fourteen million hits for the word “origami”, one hundred thousand hits for “kirigami”, thirty-two thousand hits for the phrase “modular origami”, and zero web pages with the phrase “modular kirigami”. So I wrote this page to be the first about "modular kirigami".

Modular origami involves assembling
folded modules into a symmetric structure. So the phrase "modular kirigami" seems appropriate for the works illustrated here which involve the symmetric assembly of cut pieces of paper.  These are all "pure kirigami" in the sense that no folding, glue, or tape is used.

Below are some images, but you really need to hold them in your hand to understand them. For details, see my paper in the Proceedings of the 2007 Bridges Conference: