Sometimes there are projects that we introduce with a bit of context, some background, and other times as with [RayP2]’s fractal papercraft tree, we introduce them simply because they are beautiful.

It’s a deceptively simple design of a repeating pattern of the same shape getting ever smaller with each iteration, and terminating in a tetrahedron with branches from each of its faces. It’s not origami, instead it’s a cut-and-glue design, and its construction is a surprisingly involved affair with some lateral thinking required to bend the tabs on the smaller branches. The design was first prototyped with plain paper, before a final version was made with card stock. The part that makes it exceptional is that he used shiny gold card stock with the gold side on the inside, meaning that when lit from the trunk the end of each branch glows attractively. Fitting the light required a modification to the trunk design, but this doesn’t take away from the whole.

The result is an attractive sculpture, a talking point, and something with a mathematical angle to boot, which we like. It’s certainly not been the first papercraft ptoject we’ve shown you, though perhaps these paper retrocomputers are a little less artistic.