Easy Squishy Tessellation Tower 🏢 Collapses Horizontally and Vertically
203How to fold the Squishy Tessellation Tower from an 8X8 Grid. This was a model that I stumbled upon during the last 10 minutes of the March 2025 Western Hemisphere Members Livestream. At the beginning of the livestream, member Koga had requested that I try to design a new tessellation, and it wasn't until I had only 10 minutes left that I embarked on trying to design a tessellation. I started by folding an 8X8 grid, and then turned each vertical crease into a set of crimps. The finished result was this model, which squishes flat both vertically and horizontally. Held together in one direction it looks just like an ordinary closed paper fan, but when you let go of it, it naturally springs out to a paper fan with a slightly zigzaggy folds. It's the zigzags that enable the fan to be able to be closed in the other direction.
Since the livestream, I've scoured over 3000 origami tessellation and corrugation photos and videos from YouTube, Google Images, and Flickr searching to see if anyone had come up with this model prior to my discovering it. The closest that I saw was this model from Daniel Kwan published on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/8303956@N08/2745362620/in/album-72157608087830589/
UPDATE: It turns out that Polly Verity, an origamist that specializes in origami corrugations, independently designed an almost identical tessellation, amazingly just a few days before I designed mine and she first published it here: https://www.facebook.com/reel/1108240611345617 which was a day after my March livestream. It's quite astounding that of all the thousands of intricate tessellations over the decades, there's no trace of this one even though it's so simple, and what's equally astounding is that we both discovered it independently right around the same time!
Daniel's model and this Squishy Tessellation share the same property of being able to be squished in two directions, but it's similarities end there. The folding patterns are completely different.
I still am open to the possibility that this model has been designed already by someone else, because honestly, it's astonishing to me that such a simple pattern would not have been discovered yet considering the stunning intricacy of so many origami corrugations and tessellations. But suppose someone has designed it. Then, equally stunning to me is that it's so difficult for me to find! That said, if anybody has seen this tessellation before, please tell me so I can at least include due credit here in the video description.
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