Tensegrity; art or engineering innovation?

by N.Kateris

Many of you have seen this work of art in the physicists' office

And the truth is that it is a model based on tensegrity, which is one of the most far-fetching cases of art influencing science.

Tensegrity was invented by Kenneth Snelson at Black Mountain College, the hotbed of international modernism, in 1948. At the time, Snelson was taking part in a summer school with the engineer Buckminister Fuller, who was the pioneer of applying geometrical figures to architecture (after the ancient Greeks of course).

One day, using an abstract sculpture as a starting point, Snelson added tension wires to the free floating members of the sculpture and encouraged by Fuller, Snelson had perfected by 1949 a concept in which stiff rods (the straws in my model) could be supported without touching by a network of wires (the elastic bands in my model). Although the term "tensegrity" (from tensional integrity) was coined by fuller, the idea was entirely Snelson's and he went on to make many tensegrity sculptures, which were at the time considered as pure art. His most famous creation is the 18-meter-high Needle Tower, now exhibited in Washington DC.

Although the benefits of structures held in tension were known since the invention of the suspension bridge in 1796, tensegrity architecture began to appear in the 1980s. The main protagonist was David Geiger, who built the Gymnastics Hall at the Korean Olympics in 1988.

Five years later, tensegrity's significance became apparent in the field of biology, since tensegrity helped explain the structure of cells. However, let's examine the human body before talking about cells. We are certainly a tensegrity structure. Our skeleton consists of 206 bones (tensegrity rods) that do not touch, but are held together by tendons and muscles (tensegrity wires). In the same way, cells are prevented from collapsing to a blob of jelly. For many years, cells were considered as elastic bags full of interesting chemicals. However, it has been discovered that microfilaments play the role of rubber bands and microtubules are the stiff rods. Furthermore, when cells are surrounded by other cells, proteins called integrins attach one cell to others, pulling it taut in alla directions. Therefore, even tissues resemble tensegrity structures! (there is a controversy over this topic, though)

A long time has passed since the creation of the first tensegrity sculpture in 1948, but tensegrity appears in an increasing number of topics, from art and engineering innovation to biology. Once Donald Ingber (the person who came up with how tensegrity appears in cell and tissue structure) was asked what he would save from his burning office. His answer was "The tensegrity model made by Kenneth Snelson, a gift from the artist himself".