Alexander Roodman was packing up his room, preparing for a gap year before college, when I met him at his family’s Washington, D.C., townhouse.
The room was a typical teenage disaster zone, with clothes and books strewn everywhere.
Then, Alex picked up an origami sculpture that rippled with dozens of ridges and depressions. “It’s kind of a repetitive pattern,” he said. “First, you make the diagonal folds and these lateral folds to cut the paper in half.”
