Cherry Hung With Snow

And since to look at things in bloom

Fifty springs are little room,

About the woodlands I will go

To see the cherry hung with snow.  A. E. Housman

A friend awaits, with acute eagerness, the appearance each spring of cherry blossoms. The Japanese architect Kenzo Tange observed that the cherry blossom lies at the heart of Japanese aesthetics. Whether Tange was simply making the beauty of nature analogous to the wood, silk, mulberry, clay, ink, iron and dyes of Japanese arts and crafts, or whether, as an architect, he was thinking of a more mathematical transposition from the fractal organization of a flower to the geometries of architecture and design, well, on that he did not elaborate. 

Then again, he might have been thinking of origami. To see a master’s chart of the successive folds used to achieve a model in physics or architecture, or just a geometric abstraction for its own sake, all from one sheet of paper, is to marvel at the miracle (as in the case of Chris Palmer’s origami abstraction) of its symmetrical complexity and snow-crystal beauty.