Many times over the past decades I've had discussions with my friends and colleagues about whether the golden age of origami is over. Short answer: no, it’s not over—and yes, there are absolutely new designs still being discovered. The longer, more honest answer is that origami has moved from an explosive era into a long, open-ended one with many new genres emerging.
Are there still new designs to discover? Very much so. In fact new models are published every year by contemporary designers, many of whom weren’t active during the “classic” boom periods. One implication of this is that younger creators may well re discover existing designs, and they're often not concerned enough or even aware that they could research and find if their design is truly original. Entire new design methods keep emerging (or hybridising - advanced box-pleating variations, curve-based design, tessellations, wet-folding innovations, computational and algorithmic approaches. The design space is effectively infinite. Even with known techniques, the number of viable crease patterns grows faster than anyone can exhaust.
Origami is perhaps closer to mathematics than fashion: once the basic rules exist, discovery never really ends.
Why people feel the “golden age” might be over
That feeling usually comes from one (or more) of these perceptions:
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The shock factor is gone
In the 1980s–90s, advanced modulars, ultra-complex insects or hyper-realistic animals felt revolutionary. Today, complexity alone doesn’t surprise people anymore. -
Icons defined an era
Figures like Akira Yoshizawa, Robert Lang, Satoshi Kamiya, etc., have created landmarks that are hard to “outshine” in the same way it’s hard to improve upon Beethoven. -
The availability of new subjects is lower
Over the years certain subjects have been folded in many different ways and creators are often looking for subjects that have not been explored. It becomes harder to find something that nobody has tackled before.
What’s actually happening now is that instead of one glorious golden age, origami is in a mature creative phase where:
- Designers explore depth rather than novelty: elegance, efficiency, expressiveness, minimalism.
- There’s more crossover and exploration with engineering, maths, biology, and art, creating ideas that didn’t even count as “origami” before.
- Younger designers are doing things that would’ve been impossible without the accumulated knowledge of earlier generations. They have access to a rich source of inspirational techniques.
It’s similar to chess, jazz, or mathematics - the early centuries feel dramatic; the later ones are subtler—but no less rich.
So is the golden age over? Only if you define a golden age as “the first time people realized how far this could be made.” If you define it as: “a period where new ideas, techniques, and forms are still being created,” then we’re still in it - just without the “fireworks” quite so often.
Origami hasn’t peaked, it’s just grown up
Nick Robinson