¶ Pneumatic Structures (3)
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Index Entry
Pneumatic Structures:
“in as a fundamental feeling that in dealing with geodesics in contradistinction to compressional arches where men had made lesser rings of stone and bricks and so forth, like Santa Sophia, fitting them beautifully and very mathematically, one to the other, so they wouldn’t fall in, and taking and putting chain around the bottom of the dome to take care of the thrust of the enormous weights of the buildings, they could build a dome that would not thrust outwardly at the base and allow it to collapse… I saw that in tension there is no limit-- you can make as big a pneumatic bag as you want… I saw that in the comprehensive geodesically omnitriangulated tensegrity structure I would be able to go to unlimited spans, because your only limitation is tension. I’ve found that there is no inherent limit to cross section due to length. We get to where there is no cross section visible at all, as in the pull between the Earth and the Moon… The beautiful intuitive feelings have been there right from the beginning. Always I could really feel the apple in those terms of hydraulics and doing the same tricks.”
¶ Citations
- RBF Interview by Hans Mayer, Domebook II, p. 80. Dec’70
