On Sunday morning, Robert Lang was the focus of a rebuilding story after the 2025 Altadena wildfire destroyed his house and a lifetime’s works of folded paper. The physicist and origami artist began trying to recreate the designs that made him a leading figure in origami in the 1990s.
That loss cut through more than a home. It erased a body of work built across years, and the response from the origami community turned the recovery into a shared effort rather than a private one.
Lang and the 1990s
Lang had become a leading figure in origami in the 1990s after first working as a physicist who designed lasers for NASA. He was already known for combining math and art, so the destruction of his paper archive does more than damage a personal collection; it interrupts the record of how those designs were made and refined.
For a craft built on precision, recreating a lost model is not the same as rebuilding a house. A finished piece can be copied from memory or notes, but the sequence of folds, revisions, and discarded attempts often carries as much value as the result.
Altadena wildfire loss
The 2025 Altadena wildfire destroyed the house and the folded-paper work inside it, leaving Lang to rebuild from what can be remembered and what others can help recover. The scale of that loss is why the story keeps returning to process instead of sentiment: once the paper is gone, reconstruction depends on retained diagrams, old versions, and the shared knowledge of other folder makers.
The origami community joined him as he set out to recreate the designs, which turns this from a single-artist recovery into a test of how much a craft can survive when the original archive is gone. A linked archive like this Sunday Morning route story shows how the program often returns to makers whose work outlives a single moment, but Lang’s case is sharper because the loss itself became part of the craft story.
August 23, 2026 segment
The segment appeared in the August 23, 2026 edition of CBS News Sunday Morning, airing on CBS Sundays beginning at 9:00 a.m. ET and streaming at 11:00 a.m. ET. Tracy Smith is the reporter tied to the piece, and the placement signals that Lang’s recovery is being treated as an art-world story with real stakes, not just a personal update.
What remains unresolved is how much of the lost work can be recreated in full. The answer will determine whether this becomes a careful reconstruction of a known body of origami or a partial recovery marked by gaps that only the fire could create.
