Origami: Compound of Five Octahedra


Compound of Five Octahedra, by Meenakshi Mukerji.  From the book Exquisite Modular Origami.

At first when you look at this it just looks like a many-pointed star.  But look carefully: each color forms an octahedron.  Yep, it’s five octahedra arranged symmetrically.  Classic.  I’ve already talked your ear off about symmetric colorings and polypolyhedra, so I’ll just leave it at that.

 

If you’re wondering, yes those are the aro flag colors (or at least the most common version).  Black, gray, white, light green, dark green.  It’s a good color scheme.

Comments

  1. Jenora Feuer says

    I used to have one of those, dangling as an ornament from the ceiling of my old room at our family summer cabin. Not the origami version, but a straight papercraft version based on a book we had. My recollection was that the design was a bit more… flexible than it should have been, and sagged a bit under its own weight.

    From a Google search and checking cover images, I think the book I got this from was the later 1975 printing of Magnus Wenninger’s Polyhedron Models for the Classroom; ahh, the wonders of having a math teacher as a grandfather. (Hunh, and checking up on that, apparently Wenninger just died in February, less than a year ago.)

    I need to try and find that book again.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *