Double-pointed VWXYZ squares, a design by me

Ah, so here’s a really old original design that I made in 2013.  The story goes that I have a copy of Meenakshi Mukerji’s Ornamental Origami, which has a chapter on planar models.  These are models where the folded form consists of multiple intersecting planes.  One of my favorite models of all time is Tung Ken Lam’s WXYZ Triangles, which consists of four intersecting triangles.  Later origamists would take this idea even further.  What if you had 5 intersecting planes, or 6 intersecting planes, or more?  So I made a bunch of planar models with different numbers of planes.

So as part of that whole thing, I wanted to make at least one model with 5 intersecting planes.  There is a design, by Francis Ow called VWXYZ Squares that does just that.  But either I couldn’t find diagrams, or I wasn’t satisfied with it, or else I just wanted to try designing my own.  So, that’s what we have here.

Mind you, this is not especially great origami design.  I would describe it the model as “delicate”, but it hasn’t fallen apart yet, so that’s something.  The fact that the points of the squares pull apart (thus the “double-pointed” in the name) was actually a surprise to me.  The hole at the center of the model was deliberate though.  The fact that such a simple design works so well is a testament to the power of planar models.

For the geometry geeks: can you figure out what polyhedron this is based on?  It’s not one of the named polyhedra, and it’s not very symmetrical.