Russian Teacher Creates Mind-Blowing Modular Origami Models of Famous Cathedrals

By Spooky on October 17th, 2012 Category: Art, Pics

42-year-old Sergei Tarasov, a school teacher from the Russian village of Tigritskoe, has recently completed an incredibly detailed modular origami model of Moscow’s St. Basil cathedral, from over 10,000 A4 sheets of paper.

Origami is as hard as it is impressive, and it just amazes me how some people can just take some common pieces of paper and turn them into something wonderful. Take Sergei Tarasov, an Arts teacher from a rural area 502 miles south of the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, who creates modular origami masterpieces from thousands of pieces of paper. His latest creation is a mind-blowing 1.5-meter-tall model of the iconic St. Basil cathedral, in Moscow, which took around a year to complete. Without even using a sketch for his projects, the teacher created 60,000 modular pieces and assembled them into this fragile wonder. The artwork was presented during the “Rus Masterovaya” festival dedicated to showcasing arts and crafts talent of Russian teachers.

Photo: Ilya Naymushin / Reuters

Sergei Tarasov has been fascinated by the ancient Japanese art of origami for a very long time, and he recently started teaching it to kids in a rural school. His home and the schools he works at are filled with all kinds of origami models, from rabbits, roosters and other animals to dragons, trains and buildings. He says making the specific paper modules for each project takes up most of his free time, and because he has to get them just right, there have been times when he had to disassemble his creations up to five times to make necessary corrections.

Photo: Ilya Naymushin / Reuters

Apart for the awe-inspiring origami model of St. Basil’s Cathedral, Tarasov has also created a modular paper replica of the Minusinsk Savior Cathedral, which took six months to complete. He’s now planning to recreate the Kremlin and Moscow’s Red Square.