Paper and Stick Film

In the early 1960’s Ron Resch, a self-taught techno-polymath in the Buckminster Fuller tradition, began to explore the structural possibilities of folded paper and articulated sticks. Throughout the decade Resch developed astoundingly original methods for folding vast sheets of paper in elaborate tessellated patterns creating swooping, moldable surfaces that he dreamed of applying on an architectural scale. Like Fuller, Resch wanted to create alternatives to the traditional orthogonal grid, and in his quest for a new building aesthetic he tirelessly explored a kind of embodied geometry. Any shape you can make on a computer, Resch declared you could also make with paper and sticks. Imagine this ethic taken onto a monumental scale. “Paper and Stick Thing Film” – a rarely screened movie from 1970 – documents Resch’s researches from the critical period of 1961-1969.