To Travel Is To Fold

In Taoist philosophy, the square is the First Form, the undifferentiated void from which the opposing Yin and Yang forces arise. Where others see only the void, the folder sees a world already overflowing with possibilities. His mission is to discover those possibilities and bring the square to life.
Peter Engel, Folding the Universe: Origami from Angelfish to Zen

A journey starts with a map that's roughly 4 1/2 inches wide by 7 1/2 inches long. Unfold it once, then again, by thirds, from bottom to top, then sideways again and again, like an accordion with seven vertical pleats, until it's a flat sheet more than 22 times its original size: a work, in the words of the origami master, overflowing with possibilities.

If to travel is in the best sense to bring the world to life, the essence of travel design is the fold.
Place your shirt face down on the bed and then fold it, like a map, in thirds lengthwise, then in thirds again from bottom to top. Lay your suits in a garment bag and fold in half. Put your compact Franzus folding curling iron and Braun alarm clock into a folding makeup kit. Fold your foreign currency into money clip or a billfold. Don't forget your passport. Your ticket, folded in its envelope. Your laptop computer, cell phone, Palm Pilot, portable DVD-player, electronic chess set, all folded shut. Strap all of the above onto a folding luggage trolley. Fold your coat and stow it in the overhead bin.

Fold up the seat tray in front of you and place your seat back in the upright position.

Open and fold into a manageable shape your Wall Street Journal. Unfold Vogue. You haven't left the runway and already you've done more folding and unfolding than Karl Lagerfeld's fan at the Fall collections.

On arrival you reverse the process. Unfold and hang up your clothes. Unwrap the little folded shower cap and sink into a warm tub. Shake out the fresh folded towels. Fold down the bedspread. Unfold the Itty Bitty Book light, open your portable currency converter, and check out the room service menu that is folded in a thick leather book on the table by your bed.

Coming and going, packing and unpacking, folding and unfolding. Like the flapping of wings or a grasshopper's scissor-y hopping, folding is synonymous with travel. Without it, you can't take even the first step. (Just ask my father, whose knee, that fragile hinge of cartilage and bone, was replaced with artificial parts that could set off a metal detector at the airport. Unable to negotiate the stairs, he slept in his den on a rented folding bed.)

Is it purely coincidence, then, that a TV commercial for British Airways once used folding animation to send its message: "The British simply know how to travel"? And what about the neatly folded ends on the fresh roll of toilet paper that better establishments provide, or the crisp, tucked corners on the bed in your hotel room? Is there something civilized about an edge?

The origami-like spires of the chapel at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Spring quite deliberately evoke flight and travel, even if it is to the spiritual realm; so does the wharf in Yokohama, which uses a folded structure to conjure the flow of commerce and the sea. The note that Tom Cruise leaves on Kelly McGillis's pillow in Top Gun is folded into a paper airplane. These are minor details, perhaps, but nonetheless there's something about all these folds that makes us think of travel.

He who would travel happily must travel light.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

The relationship between travel design and folding has remained constant, even as travel itself has evolved. Our ancestors—nomads looking for food, refugees looking for asylum, or foot soldiers conscripted by some higher authority—traveled out of necessity, not choice. Their only real possessions were those they could carry on their backs. Even today, while NASA's Langley Research Center is designing folding structures that can be stored in the cargo bay of a space shuttle, our more familiar and beloved travel gear harks back to those aboriginal mobile societies, for whom survival created a kind of voluptuous relationship between man and his equipment: weapons, mess kits, tents.

Folding wooden writing desks, once used by officers in the field, became prized by Victorian lady explorers; now these have morphed into folding mobile work spaces, like Lapworks' lightweight polycarbonate folding mobile Laptop dDsk, which was designed for computer users to deploy at the beach, on the floor, or when lying in bed surfing the Internet. Even the overseas or "envelope" hat, which the Army retired and replaced with the beret, was sampled in the headgear worn by stewardesses during the days of the Pan Am Clipper, a subtle reminder that huge numbers of mid-century Americans saw the world only because they were soldiers.

Over the last 50 years, during which airlines became mass transit, cheaper, faster travel has only strengthened the relationship between folding and travel gear. We of the modern middle class travel like our ancestors. We are very different from the rich, whose servants carried their trunks, or the mad, like the character in Jane Campion's The Piano. Or socialite climber Sandy Pittman (who is a little bit of both), who had Sherpas lug her cappuccino machine up Mount Everest. Yet we also like to bring our favorite things along with us when we go. It's as if we're compensating for the lack of amenities once de rigueur on Pullman cars and luxury liners.

The more things fold, the more we can bring along. Families hit the beach with folding chairs, umbrellas, boom boxes, barbecues, and baby joggers. Would-be explorers hit the road in SUVs kitted out with tents that fold out of the tailgate. Weekend warriors slither through the wilderness like the last of the Mohicans in Feathercraft folding kayaks. Kids swarm the sidewalks on folding Razor scooters. Tourists tote folding cameras and folding canes. Two Las Vegas gentlemen have patented a business card that folds into a golf tee! And what, after all, is a taco but folding food 2go?

We're a tsunami of travelers. So vast a horde come summer that the Hampton Jitney, which began operation with a single van in 1974, at one point added an oversize bus that folded in the middle. Some longtime locals, forced out by this new wave of new money, folded their tents and moved away.

Luxury, rather than necessity, is the mother of invention.
Henry Petroski, The Evolution of Useful Things

In 1982, when Lee Iacocca brought out the Chrysler LeBaron, he not only rescued his company but also revived the convertible, America's most glamorous car, the car you drove for the sake of driving. The sun on your face, the wind in your hair, the heightened sensation of speed, the Springsteen blaring into the night...all this was infinitely more appealing than a practical sedan. And this is what we love about travel: it enchants us with an illusion of freedom, regardless of the reality. Indeed, today's perfect travel experience is both liberating and casual. And if the reality is neither, successful contemporary travel design can soften the blow-whether it's a roof that folds away into the trunk of a Mercedes (turning a coupe into a roadster) or a simple nylon folding chair. To paraphrase Hegel: If freedom is the thesis and comfort the antithesis, the synthesis is folding.

For instance, when I and all the other unhappy campers on a two-week wilderness course were divesting ourselves of anything that could be considered excess baggage, like deodorant, my friend Nancy insisted on lashing a folding chair to her backpack. We thought she was as mad as someone schlepping a piano across an ocean. After a few nights in the wilderness, however, Nancy looked a lot less of a crackpot. Everyone fought for a chance to sit in her folding chair.

Designed by a former Outward Bound instructor, the chair—basically two squares of half-inch thick insulated pack cloth hinged together with carbon fiber straps—weighed just over a pound and was as easy to operate as a magazine. When you sat in it, it shifted when you did, and you could slip it under your sleeping bag for extra padding at night. A comfort to the senses as well as to the intellect.

Not that all folding travel gear is a triumph of design. And when its use is not transparent, disaster ensues. Once, while preparing for a sailboat race, my mother made a small, entirely logical error: When she and my father rounded the mark and hoisted the sail, the spinnaker she had carefully folded into its "turtle" holder ballooned out upside down.

Folding, in fact, is enough of an art that travel books and real simple magazine pieces have been devoted to the endless problems of packing. Only a genius like Issey Miyake would have the imagination to build the solution right into the problem, as he does in his Pleats Please clothing line—geometric pieces made of space-age synthetic fabric. On the body, they stretch and move to flatter almost any shape or size. They can be washed in cold water, dry quickly, and require no ironing, As for packing, roll them, fold them if you must, or crumple them in a ball and stuff them in your knapsack. The pleats are part of the fabric's "memory." Like the Swiss Army knife, a fistful of almost totemic implements, Miyake's clothes illustrate the essence of good travel design: small, light, and versatile.

A woman without a bicycle is like a fish without water.
Anonymous

My initiation into the arcana of travel gear design happened when I decided to buy a folding bike. Now, folding bicycles are not a recent invention. As early as 1904, the French Army employed a model with a special hinged joint in the middle of the frame that allowed the bike to be folded in two and carried over the shoulder. During the sixties and seventies, when small European cars were fashionable, there was a fad for folding bikes. And now, even though SUVs rule the earth, an interest in human-powered vehicles, including the ubiquitous scooter, seems to have been kindled, (There are three folding bicycles that I know of on my block alone,)

The obvious difference between now and even 30 years ago is that today's models must contend with the higher standards for all trendy modern travel gear; how do you increase portability without diminishing performance? Speed and power and high-tech materials are so taken for granted that the English Brompton, a bike that folds as neatly as an umbrella, is considered a clunker. There are, on the other hand, sophisticated portables, with the same performance specs as full-size racing bikes, which can be disassembled for transport in a suitcase. Have a couple of screwdrivers before trying to put one back together.

I ordered my bike from Peregrine Bicycle Works in Athens, Georgia, where folding purist Hugh Kern, a computer whiz turned bike builder, assured me that he could build a high-performance bike-with 20-inch wheels, dual shocks, and high-end components...which I could fold and unfold with nothing stronger than coffee.

The bicycle that arrived was not only beautiful— and taxi yellow to boot—but it rode like a Porsche. The perfect McLuhanesque medium (a travel tool that is an extension of my body) the bike was also ecologically correct, economical, and compact enough to fit in a bag I could sling over my shoulder. But the pleasure I took in it was more aesthetic than practical; my folding bike, I guess, was not so much a form of transportation as my secret flight of fancy.
The building where I worked would not allow bikes, even folding ones, so eventually I sold it.

If a machine were merely practically driven, we wouldn’t find so much energy and style given to it.
Chuck Hoberman, artist inventor.

Chuck Hoberman, an artist/inventor who likes to call himself a "folder," is showing me around his loft in an incongruously municipal-looking building on Worth Street in lower Manhattan. I have gone to talk to Hoberman about folding travel gear, but now I feel as if I've ended up in a sci-fi version of Santa's workshop. Hoberman's team of engineers are tweaking their CAD drawings while a young woman cuts tiny pieces of folded paper with an X-acto knife and a tattooed fellow puts together brightly colored jointed plastic pieces of an Expandagon, just one of several brainy award-winning toys Hoberman has created.

Toys have enabled Hoberman to pursue inventions such as a folding tent made from one sheet of corrugated plastic that can be unfolded and set up, with a simple tug, by one person; a portable geodesic shelter that can be transported from site to site, folding surgical instruments that can travel through the body for endoscopic procedures; a briefcase made of scored, corrugated plastic, like the tent, that folds down to the size of a shoebox.

"Perfect for the traveler who wants to bring home a lot of purchases," I say.

Hoberman smiles. "Why not just throw everything in a sack?"

His passion for things that transform their shape and size has taken him from a NASA contract to installations at art museums all over the world. What appeals to him, he says, are relationships between parts, between the organic and the high-tech.

Folding things are also growing things. Like us. Like the DNA evoked by Hoberman's "Expanding Helicoid," a permanent installation at the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio. And, indeed, the beauty of his creations is the biomorphic beauty of mathematics made visible. Like origami.

Or a bicycle, which balances itself by falling, as our bodies do when we walk.

Like traveling through time and space: New York to Paris.

Or the computational models that allow cosmologists to speculate from deep within the folds of the brain, where persists both the urge to travel and the mysterious pleasure of folding, whether the universe itself is flat like a map...or folds back on itself, a wrinkle in time.

Origami courtesy of Picture-newsletter.com