When a new store opens in New York City it is important to find a way to stand out from the crowded marketplace. There are also a slew of brand new things to create and like maps of the store, ways to entertain guests, art installations, and storefront displays. When Taro’s Origami Studio was contacted by Nordstrom about their new location, they were asked to try and combine them all into one. This is the progression of that successful idea.

As with any new origami project the studio takes on, there is a fun trial-and-error design stage that takes place at the beginning. The goal was to hand out guest maps of the store at the grand opening and include accessible folding instructions on the back of the map so that everyone could fold an origami model and add it to a group art display for the store. This way the maps aren’t simply discarded and everyone can help create something beautiful for the store. The team behind Nordstrom provided some useful reference photos of the direction they wanted to move in, and the Taro’s team took it from there.

Once a clear vision was chosen, the Senior Artists at the studio began working within the parameters of the structure to create easily foldable models for guests that could also simply hook onto a grid to create a work of art.  The ideas ranged from hearts, to faces, to an abstract corrugation of paper but they could be folded quickly and were designed to also have hooks of paper built into them as well.   The Taro’s team also custom printed some different mesh sizes so that the Norstrom team could see the how the different options interacted.

 In the end after presenting the different ideas and a few rounds of refinement, the origami heart version was chosen.

But then came the hard part.  After the design was finalized, the Taro’s staff worked to figure out how to make sure the model translated not only onto the wider map foldout, but also reverse engineered the model to figure out how to create a graphic that easily showed where the creases were and also only colored in the correct panels of the model.  Below you can see a finished folded model lying on top of the finished unfolded crease pattern of the model.

The next (and one of the best if you’re a professional origami folder) part of the pre-production was to go ahead and fold hundreds of these models in advance of the event.  Nordstrom wanted to make sure the art installation already had some models attached to it so guests knew how to add it it, so in total the Taro’s team folded over 500 of the hearts in advance of the event.  One of the fun parts of the project was that some of the maps were printed in different colors which added to the look of the final piece.

And lastly, the day of the event itself arrived and the Taro’s team went to work both building the initial structure and then teaching the guests the model to help build a dynamic installation that grew throughout the night.  Taro’s artists Frank Ling and Joe Adia worked the event and made sure everyone had a great time.

Taros Artists Frank Ling and Joe Adia hard at work helping to build the installation.

This is the final art installation folded from store maps.