Rapidly deployable shelters are critical for military housing on forward operating bases and for relief following natural or anthropogenic disasters. Key design priorities for such structures include a low self-weight (preferably being man-portable), transportability (i.e., air-liftable), ease of erection (i.e., without the use of heavy lifting equipment), and energy efficiency related to heating and cooling of the shelter. Toward achieving these priorities, this thesis harnesses the art of origami as inspiration for rigid wall deploying shelters and introduces a novel erection strategy for these origami-inspired shelters based on the principle of counterweighting. This thesis will review existing shelter technology in the military and relevant work in origami engineering, present a series of novel origami-inspired concepts developed by the research team, present the structural design and analysis of one promising concept, optimize this design for structural performance and energy efficiency, and finally discuss conclusions and future work.