Nature Chemistry 3, 620–727 (2011); published online 10 July 2011; corrected after print 15 August 2011.

In the version of this Article previously published, in Fig. 2, the series of 1s and 0s on the images were incorrectly placed. Also, in the penultimate paragraph of the section 'Stacking of origami rectangles', the final sentence should have referred to Fig.1e,g. These errors have now been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the Article.