This 14-Year-Old Is Using Origami to Imagine Emergency Shelters That Are Sturdy, Cost-Efficient and Easy to Deploy Miles Wu folded a variant of the Miura-ori pattern that can hold 10,000 times its own weight Ramsha Waseem - Freelance writer Get our newsletter! Get our newsletter!
Sitting in his family’s living room in New York City, 14-year-old Miles Wu was astonished to find that a simple piece of paper, folded into a Miura-ori origami pattern, could hold 10,000 times its own weight. For a total of more than 250 hours, Wu had diligently designed, folded and tested copious variations of the technique—a series of tessellating parallelograms that can fold or unfold in one fell swoop—to find one that could be used to build deployable shelters for emergency situations like natural disasters.
“I was really shocked by how much [weight] these simple pieces of paper could hold,” says Wu, who’s currently a ninth-grade student at Hunter College High School in New York City.
Wu had always been fascinated with the ancient Japanese art of origami, but he really began indulging in it as a hobby about six years ago. In 2024, he started exploring paper folding beyond its appeal as a creative pursuit. “I started reading about how different types of geometric origami were being studied and applied in STEM for their various physical properties,” he says.
Although origami dates back centuries, the fields of engineering, medicine, mathematics and architecture didn’t develop a profound interest in it until the 1960s. Since then, origami has been used in the design of biomedical devices, such as stents and catheters, and self-assembling robots.
Wu was especially intrigued by the Miura-ori fold, named after its inventor, the Japanese astrophysicist Koryo Miura. Famed for its use in aeronautical engineering, the fold has been leveraged to make solar panels for spacecraft and satellites. One of its earliest space applications was in Japan’s Space Flyer Unit, a satellite launched in 1995.
Fun fact: Bloom patterns hold great promise for science and engineering A student at Brigham Young University recently discovered a new family of origami patterns that resemble flowers as they unfold. These so-called bloom patterns could be used to build telescopes and satellites.
The pattern of creases and angles, which can be manipulated to create many variations, “folds this really large sheet of paper into a really flat, compact shape, which I thought was really cool,” says Wu.
The teenager was researching the Miura-ori fold when Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida and wildfires raged in Southern California. “I thought maybe these origami patterns, which are strong and collapsible, could be used as emergency shelters in these natural disasters—kind of like a tent,” he explains.
Wu noticed that existing structures were sturdy, easy to deploy or cost-efficient, but rarely all three. “This creates a problem during emergency situations, such as hurricanes or wildfires, as deployable shelters ideally need to be produced quickly, set up easily, and able to withstand the elements,” he says.
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