¶ Engineering
Index Entry
Until the introduction of geodesic structures, structural analysis and engineering design strategies regarding clear-span structural enclosures in general, and domical structures in particular, were predicated upon the stress analysis of individual beams, columns, and cantilevers as separate components and thereafter as a solid compressional shell with no one local part receiving much, if any, aid from other parts. Their primarily compressional totality was aided here and there by tensional sinews but tension was a discontinuous local aid and subordinate. As academically constituted in the middle of this 20th century engineering could in no way predict, let alone rely upon, the synergetic behaviors of geodesics in which any one, several, or many of the components could be interchangeably removed without in any way jeopardizing the structural integrity cohering of the remaining structure. Engineering was therefore, and as yet is, utterly unable to analyze effectively and correctly tensegrity geodesic structural spheres in which none of the compression members ever touch one another and only the tension is continuous.
