During my last two years of high school, I, like many students nearing graduation, received rather obscene amounts of mail from colleges. Occasionally this would include information from schools I was actually interested in, but more often it was letters and brochures from universities I had never heard of and had no interest in attending. Always on the lookout for interesting (and free!) origami paper, I decided to hang on to all the mail that came my way. (This also satisfied my curiosity about just how much of it there was. The answer? A lot.) I ended up with enough glossy, colorful booklets, brochures, postcards and letters that I could find pretty much any color I wanted. (Though it certainly wasn’t a uniform distribution; purple is apparently a much less common school color than red or blue.)

I had previously made a Menger Sponge from Sonobe units, which was fun but wasn’t very sturdy. It seemed like the models made from business cards (or any rectangles vaguely the same proportions) worked better and didn’t fall apart every time you tried to move them. But I’d already made one Menger Sponge, and I wanted to try something a little different. I settled on exactly the opposite; I built the shape of the empty space in a level 2 Menger Sponge.

I used the boring-looking paper to build the basic structure of the model, then choose a nice spectrum of colors of paper for the pieces that cover each external face. Just finding all the right colors was a fun project that involved spreading out bits of paper all over the floor in order to sort them. I ended up gluing on some of the these outside pieces, but the structure itself all stays together without glue.

Unfortunately, I don’t seem to have any progress pictures, but here are the results. How many schools can you identify?