The Tao Of Folding

Traveler Condé Nast

ESSAY FOLDING SHIPPED 1-19

The Tao of Folding

The essence of travel design is the fold.Tracy Young explores the wrinkles N TA O I S T P H I L O S O P H Y, T H E

Sphere designs © Charles Hoberman

square is the First Form, the undifferentiated void from which the opposing Yin and Yang forces arise. Where others see only the void, the folder sees a world already overflowing with possibilities. His mission is to discover those possibilities and bring the square to life. –Peter Engel, Origami from Angelfish to Zen A journey starts with a map that’s, say, four and a half inches wide by seven and a half inches long. Unfold it once, then again, by thirds from bottom to top, then sideways again and again, like an accordion with seven vertical pleats, until it’s a flat sheet more than 22 times its original size—a world, in the words of the origami master, overflowing with possibilities. If to travel is, in the best sense, to bring the world to life, the essence of travel design is the fold. Place your shirt face down on the bed and then fold it, like a map, in thirds lengthwise, then in thirds again from bottom to top. Lay your suits in a garment bag and fold in half. Put your compact

Franzus folding curling iron and Braun alarm clock into a folding makeup kit. Fold your foreign currency into a money clip or a billfold. Don’t forget your passport. Your ticket in its envelope. Your laptop computer, cell phone, PalmPilot, portable CD player, electronic chess set. Strap all of the above onto a Moveasy folding luggage trolley. Fold your coat and stow it in the overhead bin. “Fold up the tray in front of you and place your seat in the upright position.” Open and fold your Wall Street Journal. Or Harper’s Bazaar. You haven’t left the runway and already you’ve done more folding and unfolding than Karl Lagerfeld’s fan at the fall collections. On arrival you reverse the process. Hang up your clothes. Unwrap the little folded shower cap and sink into a warm tub. Shake out the fresh folded towels. Fold down the bedspread. Unfold your Itty Bitty Booklight, open your portable currency converter, and check out the room service menu. Coming and going, packing and unpacking, folding and unfolding. Like the flapping of wings or a grasshopper’s hopping, folding is synon-

Hemispheres of influence: Artist Chuck Hoberman and his Expanding Dome (above), inspiration for his portable geodesic shelter; his unfolding Icosahedron, aboard Royal Caribbean’s Explorer of the Seas.

STORY EDITOR DESIGNER COPY EDITOR PHOTO EDITOR



MARCH 2001

0301-TR-YF01

Traveler Condé Nast

ESSAY/FOLDINGRO SHIPPED 1-19

ymous with travel. Without it, you can’t take even the first step. Just ask my father, whose knee, that fragile hinge of cartilage and bone, was replaced with artificial parts that could set off a metal detector. Unable to negotiate the stairs, he slept in his den on a rented folding bed. Is it purely coincidence that a TV commercial for British Airways uses a folding animation to send its message: “The British simply know how to travel”? And what about the neatly folded ends on the fresh roll of toilet paper that better establishments provide, or the crisp, tucked corners on the bed in your hotel room? Is there something civilized about an edge? The origamilike spires of the chapel at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs quite deliberately evoke flight and travel, even if it is to the spiritual realm; so does the wharf in Yokohama, which uses a folded structure to conjure the flow of commerce and the sea. The note that Tom Cruise leaves on Kelly McGillis’s pillow in Top Gun is folded into a paper airplane. These are details, perhaps, but nonetheless there’s something about all these folds that makes us think of travel. He who would travel happily must travel light. –Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

T

H E R E L AT I O N S H I P B E T W E E N

travel design and folding has remained constant, even as travel itself has evolved. Our ancestors—nomads looking for food, refugees looking for asylum, or foot soldiers conscripted by some higher authority—traveled out of necessity, not choice. Their only real possessions were those they could carry on their backs. So even today, while NASA’s Langley Research Center is designing folding structures that can be stored in the cargo bay of a space shuttle, our more familiar and beloved travel gear harks back to those aboriginal mobile societies, for whom survival created a kind of voluptuous relationship between man and his equipment— weapons, mess kits, tents. Folding wooden writing desks, once used by officers in the field, became prized by Victorian lady explorers; now these have morphed into folding mobile work spaces, like Intrigo’s lightweight polycarbonate Lapstation, which was designed for computer users to deploy on the beach, on the floor, or when lying in bed surfing the Internet. Even the overseas or “envelope” hat, which the Army just recently retired and replaced with the beret, was sampled in the headgear worn by stewardesses during the days of the Pan Am Clipper, a subtle reminder that huge num-

STORY EDITOR DESIGNER COPY EDITOR PHOTO EDITOR



bers of midcentury Americans saw the world only because they were soldiers. Air travel was about to become mass transit. Over the last 50 years, cheaper, faster travel has only strengthened the relationship between folding and travel gear. We of the modern middle class travel like our ancestors—unlike the rich, whose servants carried their trunks, or the mad, like the character in Jane Campion’s The Piano. Yet we also like to bring our favorite things along with us when we go, like socialite climber Sandy Pittman (a little bit of both), who had Sherpas lug her cappuccino machine up Mount Everest. It’s as if we’re compensating for the lack of amenities once de rigueur on Pullman cars and luxury liners. The more things fold, the more we can bring along. Families hit the beach with folding chairs, umbrellas, boom boxes, barbecues, and baby joggers. Would-be explorers hit the road in SUVs kitted out with tents that fold out of the tailgate. Weekend warriors slither through the wilderness like the last of the Mohicans in Feathercraft folding kayaks. Kids swarm the sidewalks on Razor scooters. Tourists tote folding cameras— and folding canes. Two Las Vegas gentlemen have patented a business card that folds into a golf tee! And what, after all, is a taco but folding food to go? We’re a tsunami of travelers. So vast a horde come summer that the Hampton Jitney, which began operation with one small van in 1974, at one point added an oversize bus that folded in the middle. Some longtime locals, forced out by this new wave of new money, folded their tents and moved away. Luxury, rather than necessity, is the mother of invention. –Henry Petroski, The Evolution of Useful Things

I

N 1982, WHEN LEE IOCOCCA

brought out the Chrysler LeBaron, he not only rescued his company but revived the convertible, America’s most glamorous car, the car you drove for the sake of driving. The sun on your face, the wind in your hair, the heightened sensation of speed, the Springsteen blaring into the night—all this was way more appealing than a significantly more practical sedan. Travel enchants us with an illusion of freedom, regardless of the reality. Indeed, today’s perfect travel experience is both liberating and sensual. And if the reality is neither, successful contemporary travel design can soften the blow—whether it’s a roof that folds away into the trunk of a Mercedes (turning a coupe into a roadster) or a simple nylon folding chair. To paraphrase Hegel: If freedom is the thesis and comfort C O N D É N A S T T R AV E L E R

Traveler Condé Nast

ESSAY/FOLDINGRO SHIPPED 1-19

the antithesis, the synthesis is folding. For instance, when I and all the other unhappy campers on a two-week wilderness course were divesting ourselves of anything that could be considered excess baggage, like deodorant, my friend Nancy insisted on lashing a folding chair to her backpack. After a few nights in the wilderness, however, Nancy looked a lot less silly. Designed by a former Outward Bound instructor, the chair—basically two squares of half-inchthick insulated pack cloth hinged together with carbon fiber straps—weighed just over a pound and was as easy to operate as a magazine. The chair shifts when you do, and you can slip it under your sleeping bag for extra padding. A comfort to the senses as well as to the intellect. Not that all folding travel gear is a triumph of design. When, for instance, its use is not transparent, disaster ensues. Once, while preparing for a sailboat race, my mother made a small, entirely logical error: When she and my father rounded the mark and hoisted the sail, the spinnaker she had carefully folded into its “turtle” holder ballooned out upside down. Folding, in fact, is enough of an art that travel books and real simple magazine pieces have been devoted to the endless problems of packing. Only a genius like Issey Miyake would have the imagination to build the solution right into the problem, as he does in his Pleats Please line—geometric pieces made of space-age synthetic fabric. On the body, they stretch and move to flatter almost any shape or size. They can be washed in cold water, dry quickly, and require no ironing. As for packing—roll them, fold them if you must, or crumple them in a ball and stuff them in your knapsack. The pleats are part of the fabric’s “memory.” Like the Swiss Army knife, a fistful of almost totemic implements, Miyake’s clothes illustrate the essence of good travel design: small, light, versatile.

also requires you to schlepp along half a dozen “peripheral” devices if you want to make use of all the “features.”Adding insult to portability, the Apple PowerBook, that slim, folding status symbol for creative professionals on the go, is so sleek and slippery that the upwardly mobile, who are always nervous about losing their grip, buy aftermarket adhesive strips to make its surfaces easier to hang on to. (It wasn’t until the iBook that Apple’s famously “user friendly” designers provided a built-in handle.) My own initiation into the arcana of travel-gear design happened when I decided to buy a folding bike. Now, folding bicycles are not a recent invention. As early as 1904, the French Army employed a model with a special hinged joint in the middle of the frame that allowed the bike to be folded in two and carried over the shoulder. During the sixties and seventies, when small European cars were fashionable, there was a fad for folding bikes. And now, even though SUVs rule the earth, an interest in human-powered vehicles, including the ubiquitous scooter, seems to have been rekindled. (There are three folding bicycles that I know of on my block alone.) The obvious difference between now and even 30 years ago is that today’s models must contend with the higher standards for all trendy modern travel gear: How do you increase portability without diminishing performance? Speed and power and hightech materials are so taken for granted that the English Brompton, a bike that folds as neatly as an umbrella, is considered a clunker. There are, on the other hand, sophisticated portables, with the same performance specs as full-size racing bikes, that can be disassembled for transport in a suitcase. Have a couple of screwdrivers before trying to put one back together. But I finally honed in on Peregrine Bicycle Works in Athens, Georgia, where folding purist Hugh Kern, a computer whiz turned bike builder, assured me that he could build a high-performance bike—with 20-inch wheels, dual shocks, and high-end components—which I could fold and unfold with nothing stronger than coffee. The bicycle that arrived is not only beautiful—and taxi yellow, to boot—but it rides like a Porsche. The perfect McLuhanesque medium, the bike is a travel tool that is an extension of my body, allowing me to push out into the environment. It is also ecologically correct, economical, and compact enough

“Like the flapping of wings, folding is synonymous with travel”

A woman without a bicycle is like a fish without water. –Anonymous

F

O L D I N G T R AV E L G E A R M AY

provide elegant solutions to the problem of miniaturizing some basic needs such as food, clothing, and shelter, but it can run into trouble when the design tries to serve too many masters. Take your laptop computer, marketed as a “desktop replacement.” Light enough to carry anywhere, it MARCH 2001

to fit in a bag I can sling over my shoulder. But the pleasure I take in this object is more aesthetic than practical; my folding bike, I guess, is not so much a PC form of transportation as my secret flight of fancy. If a machine were merely practically driven, we wouldn’t find so much energy and style given to it. –Chuck Hoberman

C

HUCK HOBERMAN, AN ARTIST/

inventor who likes to call himself a “folder,” is showing me around his loft in an incongruously municipal-looking building on Worth Street in lower Manhattan. I have gone to talk to Hoberman about folding travel gear, but now I feel as if I’ve ended up in a sci-fi version of Santa’s workshop. Hoberman’s team of engineers are tweaking their CAD drawings while a young woman cuts tiny pieces of folded paper with an X-acto knife and a tattooed fellow puts together brightly colored jointed plastic pieces of an Expandagon, just one of several brainy award-winning toys Hoberman has created. Toys have enabled Hoberman to pursue inventions such as a folding tent made from one sheet of corrugated plastic that can be unfolded and set up, with a simple tug, by one person; a portable geodesic shelter that can be transported from site to site; folding surgical instruments that can travel through the body for endoscopic procedures; a briefcase made of scored, corrugated plastic, like the tent, that folds down to the size of a shoebox. “Perfect for the traveler who wants to bring home a lot of purchases,”I say. Hoberman smiles. “Why not just throw everything in a sack?” His passion for things that transform their shape and size has taken him from a NASA contract to installations at art museums all over the world. What appeals to him, he says, is relationships between parts, between the organic and the high-tech. Folding things are also growing things. Like us. Like the DNA evoked by Hoberman’s “Expanding Helicoid,” a permanent installation at the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio. And, indeed, the beauty of his creations is the biomorphic beauty of mathematics made visible. Like origami. Or a bicycle, which balances itself by falling, as our bodies do when we walk. Like traveling through time and space: New York to Paris. Or the computational models that allow cosmologists to speculate from deep within the folds of the brain—where persists both the urge to travel and the mysterious pleasure of folding—whether the universe itself is flat like a map or folds back on itself, a wrinkle in time. ■ 

STORY EDITOR DESIGNER COPY EDITOR PHOTO EDITOR