We’re always impressed when a bureaucratic office does something edgy and out of the ordinary, so we were delighted by the emergency preparedness video that the Metropolitan Borough of Kirkless in the United Kingdom produced. Created by Argentinian animator and videographer Joaquin Ferronato, the video advises Kirkless citizens on procedures to follow in emergency weather situations, from not sheltering under trees to not wading in dirty water. To watch the video, click here.
We thought this pop-up book by Swedish artist Andreas Johansson was quite striking. Titled From Where the Sun Now Stands it features imaginary landscapes collaged together from photographs the artist took in his neighborhood. Says the artist, “I create imaginary places that are both recognizable and completely alien. These new sites are constructions and have no history, while the places where the photographs once were taken have a very important past. For me, deserted places have a great symbolic value. They represent society’s backside, but also freedom beyond control and regulations.” To view a video of the book, visit
We thought this pop-up book by young designer Daisy Lew was worth noting for its unusual structure, combining a host of little pop-up blocks to create larger images of New York City icons: the Big Apple, a yellow taxi, the Chrysler Building and the Statue of Liberty. From one angle the pop-ups look like a city of multi-level skyscrapers, and from above you get the whole view. Check out the book on her web site at www.daisylew.com/popup.html
To celebrate the National Cherry Blossom Festival and the 100th anniversary of Japan’s gift of cherry trees to our nation’s capital, the National Building Museum commissioned artist and paper engineer Carol Barton to design do-it-yourself pop-ups that kids (and adults) could make at the event this past weekend. A pop-up Japanese Tea House and a pop-up of the Miajima Torii Gate were among the projects. Both were given out free to the crowd, along with instructions on how to cut out and assemble them. Volunteers helped with the assembly process, and everyone seemed pleased with their take-home pop-up souvenirs.
To make your own Japanese Cherry Blossom Festival pop-ups, download the designs and directions from www.cherryblossompopup.com, print them onto card stock paper and glue them together. The trees have already lost their blossom due to this year’s early spring, but you’ll have the pop-ups to remember them by.
Pratheev Sreetharan and his team of engineers at Harvard’s Microbiotics Lab had a problem. They were trying to produce very small flying micro robots (about the size of a bee). However, building such miniscule pieces of technology was fraught with difficulties. ”You’d take a very fine tungsten wire and dip it in a little bit of superglue,” explains Sreetharan. “Then, with that tiny ball of glue, you’d go in under a microscope like an arthroscopic surgeon and try to stick it in the right place.”
The solution to their dilemma was inspired by a study of origami and pop-up books. They constructed a flat sandwich of 18 layers of different materials (plastic film, carbon fiber, titanium, etc.). Then, utilizing a series of movable hinges, they folded the tiny circuit board to “pop” the robot into three-dimensional form. To watch a film of the process, go to news.harvard.edu
The robots might be used in the future for weather observations, traffic monitoring, emergency rescue, and more disturbingly, surveillance. Let’s hope this interesting pop-up application “does no evil.”
For all of you aspiring physicists out there, here’s an intriguing introduction to the workings of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, located between Switzerland and France. Not many get to actually see the collider, so to help people understand how it works, scientist Emma Sanders and paper engineer Anton Radevsky collaborated to create this exact-scale model in pop-up book form. The book describes how the Atlas Experiment is trying to uncover the origins of our universe by smashing protons together at very high speeds. It took 15 years to build the actual collider, but you can build your own paper version into the book in just a few minutes, as shown in this short YouTube video. Thanks to Bryant Holsenbeck for sending us this link.
Angelika Oeckl’s artwork is small—REALLY SMALL. She specializes in creating miniatures, and recently took on the challenge of creating the world’s smallest pop-up book. Starting with a reproduction copy of Franz Bonn’s 1878 German pop-up Theater Bilderbuch, she disassembled it and scanned the parts and pages into her computer to resize them. “It turned out to be much more difficult than I thought,” she says. “I had to redo it several times. Parts didn’t line up or the scene didn’t fold flat.” She finally succeeded, and she thinks this is the smallest pop-up book around—smaller than Ann Vanture’s mini reproduction of Lothar Meggendorfer’s International Circus which measures 22 mm by 21 mm.
To see more images of Angelika’s mini book, go to her Picasa Album.
Students in Carol Barton’s Sculptural Books class at the Corcoran School of Art and Design have been working hard to create pop-ups of their favorite recipes. The resulting dimensional illustrations range from main dishes such as Grilled Fish in Banana Leaves to deserts made with flavorings of lavender and lime. The recipes reflect an international cuisine typical of Washington, D.C.’s multi-national mix. And though the food here is all of paper, it looks good enough to eat.
A group of wonderful little videos showing historic pop-up books in action has been posted to YouTube by the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper Hewitt Design Museum. It’s a movable library in action. Here are the links:
Puss in Boots, 1934, Blue Ribbon Books
Popeye with The Hag of the Seven Seas, 1935, Pleasure Books
Cowboys in Pop-Up Action Pictures, 1951, Publicity Products, London
Tony Sarg’s Treasure Book, 1942 B. F. Jay publishers
Dick Tracy pop-up book by Harold Lentz, 1935, Pleasure Books
Pinnochio pop-up book by Harold Lentz, 1933, Blue Ribbon Books
What a Surprise by Ernest Nister, 1900, E. P. Dutton & Co.
The Jolly Jump-Ups Journey Through Space, 1952, McLoughlin Bros.
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