Wallpaper. May 2001. This is a Fold Up by Carrie Hutchinson

Enlai Hooi's delicate paper sculptures form the basis of his award-winning furniture designs, and they're causing a stir in Sydney.

When the show 'Experiments in Folding' opened in Sydney in February, the buzz surrounding 21-year-old Enlai Hooi, its creator, reached new heights. Design editors had already fallen over their own superlatives in praise of his delicate work. In August 2000, he won the Sydney Morning Herald Young Designer of the Year Award for Screen, a Tyvek room divider developed in just six days from a folded sculpture. At this opening, however, the fashionistas were also pawing the young designer, promising him coverage and glory.

The following evening, Hooi talks animatedly about each of the 19 paper creations in the exhibitions, as well as the four pieces of furniture - three screens and a table - that are the result of these 'experiments'. For Hooi, the intricate folded-paper pieces are more than just decoration; they are the structural starting points for larger and more functional designs, including the [Shell 3] screen, which is due to go into production.

'I arrived at the screen by pushing paper around, by playing with it. When you look at the crumpled pieces, patterns emerge, and those patterns have particular mechanical and structural properties. If you formalize them in patterns and grow them, they become things.'

'People say they look engineered, as if they were done on a computer,' Hooi continues. 'There is no way a computer can have the intuition to do something like that. The pieces actually "suggest" things, like the fasciae of buildings in architecture or fabrics from a fashion viewpoint.'

Hooi first became interested in the potential of paper as a first-year industrial design student at the National School of Design. The class was assigned a project to come up with 100 chair designs. 'Instead of looking at "what is a chair?", I looked at it from a material basis: how many chairs can you get out of paper, sheet metal, glass, wire? But I got stuck on paper. Not only did I come up with about 150 designs, I just loved it. It gave me more options that I ever thought possible.'

It is an approach used by two of Hooi's greatest influences: the Spainsh architech Santiago Calatrava and Italian engineer Pier Luigi Nervi, who started with folded paper before attempting to recreate the form using concrete. It is the progression from a small paper formation to a piece of furniture, for instance, that fascinates Hooi.

'It takes a bit of faith,' he says with a grin. 'You can't say that because something works in paper it will definitely work in another material. But if you do that experimentation that leads to discovery, it has values beyond our immediate thought capacity.'