Taro’s Origami Brings SOAR to Life

 The  6-Month Origami Project Took Flight in Plano, Texas

After more than six months of design, testing, folding, engineering, and preparation, the SOAR origami installation at St. Andrew Methodist Church in Plano, Texas, finally left the ground.

The project, created for St. Andrew’s 40th anniversary, had been planned on a scale considerably larger than a typical origami installation. More than 1,800 individually folded birds were prepared for three different worship spaces across the church campus, with approximately 1,000 doves destined for the main sanctuary alone.

For behind-the-scenes information on the detailed planning, rendering, and preparation that went into the project- check out the link below.

[Plano] Origami Installation @ St. Andrew Methodist

Read more here.

www.tarosorigami.com

From Brooklyn to Plano

On Saturday, August 29, Frank Ling and Oliver arrived in Plano after driving approximately 1,500 miles from Brooklyn, New York, over the course of only 48 hours. Packed into the truck were the carefully prepared origami birds, large sections of custom netting, rigging materials, and the equipment needed to turn months of studio preparation into a finished installation.

The trip marked the transition from the production phase of SOAR to the most visible and technically demanding part of the project: installing thousands of individual birds inside the church.

The preparation work had already involved an extensive amount of planning. Frank Ling and Ben Friesen had visited St. Andrew Methodist during the design phase months earlier, taking measurements and developing detailed three-dimensional renderings of the proposed installations. The team used those renderings to determine the position of individual birds and to work out how the flock would interact with the architecture of each space.

The rigging system was also designed around the scale of the project. Rather than attempting to suspend every bird individually from the ceiling, birds were attached to a large sections of netting. The netting could be assembled at a manageable working height and then raised into its final position, allowing hundreds of birds to become part of a single three-dimensional flock.

There were 3 spaces the congregation wanted to decorate and the first hurdle was the main sanctuary.

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Building the flock in the main sanctuary

Following Sunday services on August 30, the installation work in the main sanctuary began in earnest.  There were two kids of birds, both designed and trademarks by renowned origami artist Taro Yaguchi.  There were red cardinals to represent loved one that have gone before us, and then they transitioned into white doves to show the loved ones that surround us today.

The scale of the space became immediately apparent for the staff, as they needed to ascend to the church catwalk to attach the netting ropes.  What had existed in the Brooklyn studio as a flat net of hundreds of individual points needed to be positioned within the cavernous architectural environment, with each bird contributing to the overall shape and movement of the flock.

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The team worked from the previously developed plans attaching the birds, checking their spacing and orientation, and then gradually raising the completed section into the sanctuary. Suspension lines of different lengths gave the birds their varied final elevations, creating the impression of a flock moving through space instead of a flat collection of decorations.

For the Taro’s installation team, the process was highly detailed. Every bird was placed in an exact location, and had to be individually checked and adjusted as the flock was assembled.

Work continued throughout the week, and by Friday, the main sanctuary installation was complete.

The result was a sweeping field of over 1,000 white origami doves and red cardinals suspended above the worship space, transforming the ceiling into a three-dimensional flock of birds.

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Publicity

Once the final birds were installed and the installation was ready for it’s last lift, the local press were invited to witness the the completion in the sanctuary and take in the scale of the project.  Several major media outlets ran stories on the project as everyone was thrilled to share the results.

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WFAA ABC 8

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PLANO STAR COURIER

starlocalmedia.com

Read more here.

starlocalmedia.com

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DFW NBC 5

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Taro Arrives

Then on Sunday September 6th the congregation of St Andrew got their first look at the finished sanctuary installation.  To add to the festivities, Taro Yaguchi himself was in attendance and treated everyone to an oversized folding demonstration of their unique cardinal model.  This gave everyone a chance to see the amount of complexity in each and every bird.

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The Unveiling

After marveling at the folding process, the members of the congregation got a chance to see the fruits of all the labor.  The Taro’s Origami team was pointed out during the service and they also got to see what everything looked like under the stage lights.

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The Flock Expands to Hasley

Bu the sanctuary was only the first stage.

After the September 6 service and celebration centered around the newly installed birds, the team moved on to the second major installation at Hasley Chapel.  The main difference there was that the birds were installed all the way from the main entrance, through the floor and up to the cross at the top of the roof.  This meant that Ben Friesen got a chance to work on his pneumatic lift skills as that was the only safe way to reach the ceiling.

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Approximately 650 birds were installed in the chapel, requiring the team to adapt the installation system to a considerably different and more narrow space.

The team dove in right after the sunday service and actually managed to finish the Hasley install in a little over only 2 days.

A third flock of approximately 200 birds was also installed in the Smith Worship Center by the St Andrew’s team, bringing the total number of birds across the three spaces to roughly 1,850.

Together, the installations created three distinctly different expressions of the SOAR concept throughout the St. Andrew campus.

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Celebrations

The completed installations became part of St. Andrew Methodist Church’s 40th anniversary celebrations, which culminated on September 13.

What began months earlier as a design and engineering project in New York had become a physical part of the church’s anniversary observances in Plano.

The project also demonstrated the logistical side of creating large-scale origami artwork. While the finished installation appears relatively simple—a flock of birds suspended in flight—the completed work represents thousands of individual decisions about paper, folding, placement, rigging, spacing, architecture, and installation.

For the congregation though, those technical details largely disappeared once the flock is in place.  Instead, the birds presented a simple visual idea: hundreds of individual paper doves appearing to work together and take flight above the people gathered below, much like how the individuals in a church create the congregation.

For the installation team, that reward came at the end of a long process that began with a drawing and a folded sheet of paper in Brooklyn, continued through months of production and preparation, and ultimately crossed the country to become part of St. Andrew Methodist Church’s 40th anniversary in Plano.

SOAR had finally taken flight.

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