How does tensegrity work

The follow-up video by Yoshiny Yo, below, is a really wonderful step-by-step demonstration of how this balance of tension and compression forces are working:. This video makes sense intuitively for kids and adults alike. This Webby award-winning video collection exists to help teachers, librarians, and families spark kid wonder and curiosity. TKSST features smarter, more meaningful content than what's usually served up by YouTube's algorithms, and amplifies the creators who make that content.

Curated, kid-friendly, independently-published. Support this mission by becoming a sustaining member today. Eugene M. Donald E. Tensegrity is a design principle that applies when a discontinuous set of compression elements is opposed and balanced by a continuous tensile force, thereby creating an internal prestress that stabilizes the entire structure.

Tensegrity is a term with a rich and sprawling history. It was coined by Buckminster Fuller, the iconoclastic architect, engineer, and poet, to describe his vision of a new kind of architecture, one that looked like it was built by nature instead of by humans.

In contrast to the pyramids, columns, and brick-on-brick buildings of the past, which pile solid elements compressively, one on top of the other, Fuller imagined a world full of unconventional structures that maintain their stability , or integrity, through a pervasive tensional force, hence the term tensegrity.

Fuller began developing his vision in the s, at a time when many were exploring new directions in design and architecture. But it was his student, the sculptor Kenneth Snelson, who, in , created the first structure to be defined as a "tensegrity" Fig. Using two X-shaped wooden struts suspended in air by a taut nylon cable, Snelson captured the defining features of tensegrity:.

For much of history, architecture had been preoccupied with making things stable but Snelson's X-structure unlocked a world in which structures could be flexible and firm, holistic and hierarchical. Over the past 60 years, artists, engineers, and architects have used the lessons of tensegrity to build previously impossible structures—space frames, deployable moon-base shelters, as well as sky-piercing sculptures—helping to realize Fuller's vision of a universe filled with man-made tensegrity structures.

Snelson would later argue that tensegrity is a principle that is realized only through man-made objects. But Fuller's vision rested on the conviction that nature builds using tensegrity. Indeed, the human frame with its many tensile muscles, ligaments, and tendons pulling up on the rigid bones of the body, thereby stabilizing and supporting them against the force of gravity, is a prime example of tensegrity at work. In the last few decades, scientists have shown that tensegrity is a fundamental design principle of nature, operating at the level of organs, tissues, cells, and even molecules Ingber, Their discoveries are leading to a whole new array of man-made tensegrity structures, this time at the micro- and even the nano-scales.

Tensegrity is not an easy concept to grasp. It is best seen and felt, and authors often suggest that readers build their own tensegrity structures. Another way in is through history. What follows is essentially a story: the rise of tensegrity from a concept known to an esoteric few to become a well-recognized design principle of nature, one that is leading to radically new solutions to age-old problems in medicine, engineering and beyond.

Though tensegrity was first realized in the mid 20th century, some have seen hints in a sculpture by the Russian constructivist artist, Karl Ioganson Emmerich, ; Motro, Yet Ioganson's purpose was to show how a tensile structure could be deformed rather than made stable.

Fuller, on the other hand, appears to have been obsessed by the idea of stability even as a child. Nearly blind from birth, he developed a tactile feel for geometrical shapes, in particular triangles and tetrahedra, which impressed him as the most stable shapes in nature.

Fuller perceived that nature's forms were the result of matter being acted upon by force and, in , proposed that nature itself is a finite energy system consisting of the forces of tension and compression acting synergetically, a theory he would later term Energetic-Synergetic Geometry Fuller, Though compression had been considered dominant and, for this reason, had been favored by architects and builders, Fuller was finding tension to be the stronger and more versatile force.

For example, he saw that if a compression-bearing element such as a rod or tube were too long, it would buckle and finally break when compressed at both ends, while a tension-bearing element such as a cable or rope might be pulled with great force over virtually unlimited distances and still not tear apart.

In , he became captivated by the possibility of building a suspension bridge without end and turned to nature for models of how tension operates on a grand scale.

Looking to the sky, he viewed the planets as isolated compression elements held in place by the invisible but pervasive tensile force of gravity. He believed that this same arrangement— discontinuous compression, continuous tension —was mirrored in the atom, with its swirl of electrons orbiting around the nucleus, all bound together by attractive and repulsive forces operating at the subatomic level.

Searching for an example in the man-made world, he eventually fixed on the wire bicycle wheel. Fuller saw how the wheel's hub and rim acted as discontinuous compression elements, each resisting the deforming pull of the tension-bearing spokes, and was impressed by how the spokes could be made thinner and thinner without compromising the wheel's stability.

Indeed, the wire bicycle wheel would become Fuller's template for thinking about tensional integrity for decades to come. It was still his model in the summer of , when he was invited to teach at Black Mountain College, an experimental arts school in North Carolina that had counted among its teachers such luminary artists as Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, and Josef Albers.

Though not yet world-famous, Fuller gained an immediate following. After arriving, he gave a three hour evening lecture on tensional integrity, complete with geometric models, that, according to later reports, captivated the students, none more so than Kenneth Snelson. Snelson, who had come to Black Mountain to study painting with Albers, had been invited to help Fuller set up his models before the lecture and was so excited by what he heard that he spent the night recreating Fuller's models.

The two became close. The following autumn, Snelson, inspired by his summer studies with Fuller and Albers, completed a series of three sculptures, the last of which consisted of two X-shaped plywood modules, one floating miraculously above the other, held in place only by tensed nylon wires, anchored to a plywood base Fig.

Fuller was stunned when he saw Snelson's X-structure and would later write that it 'catalyzed' his thinking Fuller, Snelson would recount the event differently. In a letter written years later, he described how Fuller studied the sculpture, turned it over in his hands, and then asked if he could take it home Snelson, The next day, Fuller told Snelson he had gotten the configuration wrong, asked him to replace the X-shaped modules with tetrahedra, and then had his picture taken with the new structure.

That photo would later appear in magazines without mention of Snelson. Using his newfound insight into what, in , he termed 'tensegrity,' Fuller turned his attention to the building of towering masts and geodesic domes. He knew that the geodesic arrangement builds on the strength of the triangle and had long suspected that tensegrity was also at work.

With Snelson's template in mind, he was now able to see how the dome, though built of non-flexible elements, exhibited tensegrity: he saw how the continuous transmission of tensional forces across the frame is balanced by a subset of struts that resist compression. Having confirmed his hunch that tensegrity was key to the dome's stability, he began working out the mathematical proportions for a wide array of geodesic designs Fig. Many of these designs resulted in lucrative patents, popping up in such diverse projects as weather observatories, Cold War early warning radar-detecting stations, moon and satellite structures, the Sydney Opera House, and a World's Fair pavilion that won a Gold Medal award from the American Institute of Architects in Initially, Fuller acknowledged Snelson's contribution but eventually dropped mention of his name.

In , Fuller was invited to exhibit his tensegrity structures, including a 30 foot mast, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Snelson, who had become alienated from Fuller following their dispiriting encounter, heard about the upcoming show and contacted the curator, who arranged for Snelson to exhibit a recreation of his 'Early X-Structure,' among other sculptures Snelson, ; Gough, His contribution finally acknowledged, Snelson embarked on what would become a brilliant career as a sculptor, producing a dazzling array of tensegrity structures.

By experimenting with the arrangement of cables and struts—and he turned from wood to metal rods and tubes—he was able manipulate the prestress in the system to create structures of crystalline beauty in virtually any form. Like Fuller, he would explore the apparently limitless power of tensed cables to create structures of enormous length and height, including his famous Needle Tower, which he erected in outside the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D. At 60 feet, it dwarfed Fuller's 30 foot mast.

Both men had hit upon a key feature of tensegrity, its modularity, but the conceptual schism between them grew. Public art is an important part of society. Buckminster Fuller, building on the highly original sculptures of Kenneth Snelson, coined the term, to indicate that the integrity of the structure derived from the balance of tension members, not the compression struts.

Whereas an ordinary table stays up because the tabletop pushes down with the weight of gravity on some rigid legs, this one is held together by a balance of forces pulling in different directions. Those strings on the left are actually pulling up! Skip to content How does tensegrity work? Tensegrity, tensional integrity or floating compression is a structural principle based on a system of isolated components under compression inside a network of continuous tension, and arranged in such a way that the compressed members usually bars or struts do not touch each other while the prestressed tensioned How do tensegrity chairs work?

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