Exdented Boxes, designed by David Huffman

This is a tessellation by David Huffman, which I took directly from an academic article titled “Reconstructing David Huffman’s Origami Tessellations“.  It’s a great starting point if you want to fold 3-dimensional tessellations, or at least it would be if anyone made tutorials for it.  I’m shocked that this tessellation isn’t more widely known.

I particularly like how this design lies entirely along orthogonal planes, which is a restriction to be sure, but one that suggests a world of other possibilities.  When I designed the cube tessellation, this is the sort of design I drew inspiration from.  (Fact check: apparently I folded this model in 2018, and I designed the cube tessellation in 2017.  I don’t know how time works.)

Lately I’ve been thinking more about symmetry in origami (which I have written about in the past).  Every periodic tessellation belongs to one of 17 distinct types of symmetries, known as the wallpaper groups.  I’ve been training myself to recognize wallpaper groups, so now I can tell you that this one is the p4 symmetry group.  I’ll write about this more later, this is just what they call foreshadowing.